Featured Interview: Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon 

by Joshua Auerbach

Excerpt on avant-gardism and innovation in poetry:

JA: There are some quite surprising things going on in some of the poems in Moy Sand and Gravel. For example, in “The Whinny,” “The Braggart,” “Pomegranates,” “Affairs of State,” “Pineapples and Pomegranates,” “Winter Wheat,” “When Aifric and I Put in at that Little Creek,” where you join desire and eros with potential destruction. If I think about it, Donne was one of the first English poets to really make sexuality his subject matter. In your poems there is a subtle degree of desire juxtaposed with a subtle degree of instability or violence; they coexist as perhaps two separate instances within the poem. Often there are poems about sex or death, which, as Yeats suggested, makes for good poetry. A fair number of your poems also seem to combine both. Why did you choose to write along this “edge”?

PM: Well, the edge is the only place, if indeed it is the edge. I’m sure there are edgier places than that. But the edge is where one must be. It’s where the poem wants to be. I think all poetry is aiming for avant-gardism, not necessarily in some conventional sense, if indeed we can talk about the conventions of the avant-garde, which, let’s face it, we can. I mean, in a strange way avant-gardism is as riddled with conventions as the conventional. One of the main ones being its propensity towards nonsense. Which is all very fine and well; meaninglessness is always of interest, and is meaningful, from time to time. But it’s also terrifically easy to do. Any fool can be meaningless. But I do like to play with that from time to time, certainly. Now, in terms of subject matter, it’s from time to time disturbing, absolutely, it’s disturbing. The speaker of a poem like “Affairs of State,” for example, is in an odd position. We’re talking about terrorist activity, basically.

JA: The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry describes your writing as both “wily and mischievous.” Do you think some part of poetry should stay irreverent? I’m thinking of your lines like “with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click,” or “with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick,” or “The plowboy was something his something as I nibbled the lobe / of her right ear and something her blouse…”

PM: Yeah, I think so. But you know if you look at those refrains from “The Loaf,” for example, “with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick,” or the various versions of that, “with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click,” that’s on the borderline between meaning and its opposite. The fact is, if anything, unlike many traditional refrains, it’s more meaningful than most of them, and the idea, I suppose, is that the little shifts comment on the action, as it were, and there’s some discovery with each of them. I’d like to think, anyway, there’s some real revelation with each of them, even though they seem to be virtually nonsensical, from some angles.

Vis-à-vis the “something” in that poem, I sent that poem to a magazine editor in the US and he sent it back and said, “This is absolute garbage, when you write like ‘this’ I might think of publishing it.” And the fact is that to use the word “something” like that in the context of the poem, as far as I’m concerned, does reflect how we speak. I think we’ve all said, you know, even in terms of the lines of a poem, “I’ve wandered lonely as a something, that floats on high something, something, something.” Right? I mean, we all have those little lapses of memory, for example, where we put in a little bit of emphatic communication. So that poem, as far as I’m concerned, is just reflecting that, reflecting an aspect of the world, and the fun with it is, actually, that you can begin to join up the dots, as it were, and fill up the spaces.

JA: At a panel in New York at Baruch College, you stressed the idea of poetic evolution over the idea of poetic revolution. What does this mean for you?

PM: I would have to think of the context in which I was saying that. Now poetic evolution over poetic revolution? Okay.

JA: I’ll rephrase the question. How important is an innovative poetics for you?

PM: I think every poem is necessarily innovative. So it’s that important; it’s that important. But as I said, I think it has to be borne in mind that, to go back to what I was saying earlier on, one of the main ways in which people seem to think of themselves at the cutting-edge is where that edge coincides with, to sue that word again, meaninglessness, with a distant avowal of the possibility of clarity. So I do like to think that clarity is something towards which one is aiming, you know, some kind of clarification of the world. Does this make any sense to you?

JA: Yes, except that you seem to be stressing both the valorization of meaninglessness and the importance of clarity at the same time, which don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.

PM: No, that’s true, but I think what I was getting at earlier on was that I think there may be moments of what look like meaninglessness, as in the case of that refrain, as in the case of the use of the word “something” in that poem, that are actually about clarification, rather than something else. But in that sense, I can’t imagine any poet, really, who is not interested in doing something new. But I think we need to be mindful that there’s a “new” and a new. I’ve not a great deal of time for certain aspects of the avant-garde, as it’s formally presented.

This is an excerpt from Joshua Auerbach’s interview with Paul Muldoon in 2004 published in Vallum 3:1 “Reality Checks”. To read the rest of the interview and other poems published in this issue, please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

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Interview with Jami Macarty, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award

Photo: Vincent Wong

Jami Macarty teaches contemporary poetry and creative writing at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Landscape of The Wait (Finishing Line Press, 2017), a chapbook of poems written out of her nephew William’s car accident and year-long coma. A former Executive Director of Tucson Poetry Festival (1996-2005), she currently serves as a poetry ambassador for Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, Rachel Rose. She is co-founder and editor of the online poetry journal The Maynard, and writes Peerings & Hearings–Occasional Musings on Arts in the City of Glass, a blog series for ANMLY (FKA Drunken Boat). She is also a dedicated practitioner of yoga and meditation, a fact that quickly surfaced during our conversation about her Vallum Chapbook Award-winning manuscript, Mind of Spring.

During the month of June, Jami Macarty and I corresponded over email to discuss meditation, bliss, interconnectivity, the palo verde (desert tree species), and the difficulty of articulating anything about the creative process with absolute certainty, among other topics. By fusing her poetic practice with her yogic practice, she is able to write in a voice that welcomes everything “just as it is.” The resulting poem is contemplative and intuitive, as well as vivid and visually stunning. Our correspondence has been edited for brevity.

– Jay Ritchie

 

VALLUM: Mind of Spring has a very distinctive voice, in how it chooses to present imagery, relay emotion, and move the reader through space. How did you arrive at this voice, for this chapbook?

MACARTY: At the risk of seeming to parse words, I’m not sure “I” arrived at this voice. I’d put it this way: this voice came to the foreground to claim its say. The poem uses meditative contemplation as a compositional mode, and from that mode comes the voice of a season of the mind. The mind speaks in the poem. The voice of this mind emanates from the deep self, the “guru” voice of the higher self. Qualities of the voice that interest me: it’s surprisingly shame-free; it has rare candor and intense tenderness for self, other, and environment. Its aim seems simply to welcome what arises—nest-building, DVD-returning—everything just as it is, in its field of attention, moment-to-moment.

VALLUM: I’m especially interested in the speaker’s ability to “welcome what arises” and treating activities like DVD-returning the exact same way it would treat something more conventionally beautiful, like smelling a flower or seeing a tree. When writing this way do you, as the poet, enter that state of mind? Living moment-to-moment?

The field of the poem intends to be an open space, a neutral space, welcoming everything.

MACARTY: Rather than it being an “ability” to “enter that state of mind”—to welcome what arises, moment-to-moment—it is an intention. The field of the poem intends to be an open space, a neutral space, welcoming everything. The poem tracks and enacts the expression of that intention through its compositional mode, which is contemplative, meditative. It can be weird to make these distinctions this way. You see, I’m answering these questions after the fact. I have to admit, or risk pretension, I don’t know exactly why choices were made, for what I was going. I am, at this time, not that one anymore.

VALLUM: Do you see a relation between a contemplative/meditative compositional mode and the season of spring? For example, would winter inspire a different mode?

MACARTY: What a charming question! The palo verde tree blooms in the desert’s spring. Across the city of Tucson, the blossoms are masses of yellow, joyful to behold. The palo verde bloom is long-lasting and expansive. Perhaps that’s part of why this led to the compositional mode. Then again, I’m an all-season meditator, so meditation is a constant in my life. Winter might indeed inspire a different mode, but I wouldn’t know what that was until the words began their process. I wish we could pose this question to Wallace Stevens, one of my deep loves. His poem “The Snowman” opens with:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

I could say the blooming palo verde trees gave me a mind of spring and are a Mind of Spring.

VALLUM: Which other poets do you admire?

MACARTY: This is a question, the answer of which, to me, is enormous. How do I answer it? I admire many, many poets. I want to include everyone! How about this—that I answer the question from the field of this poem? Those poets joining Wallace Stevens, and who provide some shoulders on which Mind of Spring stands, are William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Clarice Lispector; O, and these beautiful writers: Jesse Ball, Danielle Vogel, Hiroshi Ito, Rebecca Solnit, Cecelia Vicuna, Bhanu Kapil, Pierre Cixous, plus bits and pieces of writings on narrative and rhetorical devices, and the maps of geographer Denis Wood.

VALLUM: I’d like to talk a bit more about the writing process. Do you listen to music while you write?

MACARTY: For about a month leading up to the actual manifested ink on paper of Mind of Spring, I was listening to the music of those writers just mentioned, plus Bach, and the This American Life series Ira Glass did on Denis Wood’s mapping. My consciousness had been holding onto this abundance of words and sounds and images until Saturday and Sunday, April 21^st and 22^nd, 2012, the two days during which Mind of Spring was made. That weekend, I was on my own, and relishing listening to the silence and whatever else entered the field of (my) hearing. For instance, the voice of this sign [below], which called to me from the soft shoulder—speaking of which—of the avenue being walked in Mind of Spring. The consciousness of the poem listens to the verbal signatures of people and things entering its field. Everything, every sound, sight, taste, scent, touch, was oracular.

VALLUM: I am curious about how certain words are drawn out, like
“y y e l l o w s”—would that be a poetic manifestation of these “verbal signatures”?

MACARTY: I was wondering how we’d get here, to the echoing vowels and consonants in Mind of Spring, which are still somewhat mysterious to me. Yes, I can go with your question and agree that to some extent those “drawn out” words, as you refer to them, are a poetic manifestation of “verbal signatures.” That arrival—at “verbal signatures”—is a surprise to me. I want to try to say what else, more specifically, the echoes, repeats, seem to want to do. One thing is emphasis, the way a stutter or echo can add emphasis. They attempt also in some places to create a fullness, an abundance. In all cases, I’d venture they attempt an enacting, an enactment. For example:

t take alley
     where usually
     pit bull r r rile

I’d love to stay with this a bit, and with your help, see if I can get even closer to this still mysterious (at least to me) aspect of the poem​. So, to gently and respectfully turn the table, would you say more about their effect on you?

VALLUM: Absolutely. I wanted to ask about them because they are so unusual, but also so intuitive. As I read them I’m not confused, they seem natural, which is, in a way, confusing! Why do they fit in the field of this poem? I think for me, this long poem doesn’t occupy a lot of space on the page, visually, so every word that makes it into the poem has more significance. So, when a word “lasts longer” in the speaker’s experience, it’s drawn out. For example: “no cars left t     no cars right t”: I interpret the added “t” as being the viewer looking a little further left, then right, into their periphery. It’s a long look. But, as you mention with enactment, in something like “t take path” the initial “t” is indicative of a hesitation. Then there’s the more internal register, like “home m m”: that’s almost like mediation, the OM, using sound to create a sensation. So, for me as a reader, they’re a way of creating different sorts of emphasis, kind of like articulation marks on sheet music.

MACARTY: Wow! My heart has goosebumps! And now it’s running through the streets singing yes yes yes, another human soul, reader has entered and is in the field of Mind of Spring, is in the poem’s sound field, is a sound in the poem’s field. What you say especially about “home m m,” as the OM (traditionally the three syllable AUM), points me to the ways my Bhakti (devotional yogic chanting practice) infuses the field of the poem and is a Presence in the field. I hadn’t fully realized that in a way I could articulate. You, through the field of the poem, pointed me toward Awareness! That makes me happy; bliss—Ananda!—arises. This discovery, this connection—yours and mine—reveals unequivocally the Presence (of Goddess) as a constancy in my life. Are you with me?

VALLUM: I’m with you! I’m feeling the bliss here in my office chair, across the country. I don’t recognize some of the yogic vocabulary you’re using, nor am I familiar with the practice, though I believe I’m inferring their meanings correctly. Do you think that poetry is a way to create meaningful connections between people; by catalyzing bliss, awareness, or other sensations?

…it is a gesture of self-trust and trust of other, and allows for the communication to be elevated and also deeper between us, which is another way of saying that we are communicating via the intuitive, present moment.

MACARTY: Yes, that’s what we’re talking about, while also feeling it: language can transmit feeling, connecting us, two strangers on opposite sides of the country. There is simultaneity and togetherness even while there is also linearity and separateness. And also the process of inference, as in your “inferring their meanings,” feels so sacred, feels such a necessity, because it is a gesture of self-trust and trust of other, and allows for the communication to be elevated and also deeper between us, which is another way of saying that we are communicating via the intuitive, present moment. This is the language and possibility of poetry. Also, I realize those extended notes act like Bija mantras, the one-syllable seed sounds that when uttered activate the energy of the chakras to purify, balance, and transform. The intention of the one-syllable notes in Mind of Spring seems to be to enact energy in the seasonal landscape, and to activate energy within the reader. Wow, this conversation has brought to the fore much about my practice of yoga and meditation…

VALLUM: Let’s talk about that a bit. How does your poetry practice relate to your yoga/meditation practice? Do you feel yourself entering a similar state of awareness when writing and when meditating, or are they disparate?

MACARTY: Practice is practice. My writing practice is meditative, is meditation. When it occurred to me some years back to think about and establish a writing practice that paralleled my practice of yoga postures, meditation, and chanting, the two came together as one practice of devotion.

VALLUM: I think that meditative state of being definitely comes through in the chapbook. If you could leave your reader with one feeling to take away from Mind of Spring, what would it be?

MACARTY: A one feeling take-away? That’s foreign to my way of thinking. One response that comes to mind is to contextualize the poem in hopes this may be of use to the reader. There’s also the presence of the thought “that response may be something to work against.” And, there’s the rub of dualities. The very “thing”—a warring of opposites—Mind of Spring, in its three parts, contemplates. Social, cultural, environmental, and personal mechanisms of war and the grief they accrete abide with (and within a poem of) uplift in the welcoming field. Everything just as it is—a radical contemplation of union between and among disparates.

Mind of Spring won the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. You can pre-order the chapbook through our online store.

Featured Interview: George Elliott Clarke Part 2

George Elliott Clarke (Part 2)

by Henry Kronk

The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary [National] Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is an Africadian (African-Nova Scotian). A prized poet, his 14th work is Extra Illicit Sonnets (Exile, 2015), an erotic verse narrative. Now teaching African-Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has also taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer.

This interview is part 2 of 3, to listen to the whole interview please download the FREE APP and get the latest issue of Vallum on your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum magazine is available as a digital feature with additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Featured Interview: Erín Moure.

Where Language Lives: A Conversation with Erín Moure
Interview by Francesca Bianco

Francesca Bianco: I’ve often noticed that critics write about your preoccupation with language. Is this true, do you always gravitate towards writing about language? Perhaps there is simply a tendency for your audience to presume this impulse. Either way, Language with a capital L: the thing that supposedly makes us feel secure, the institution that makes us believe we are all on the same voyage. Though there are many ships to embark on. What happens when you translate a poem? What is lost or gained? Especially in poetry where every line holds equal freight?

Erín Moure: I write “about” many things! But I am always conscious of language, which is and is not mine, and which bears cultural, social and ideological weights. My awareness of this doesn’t make me feel all that secure! A poem or text cannot, in itself, be translated. I can only translate my reading of a poem at a given moment. The ciphers that are the poem must be translated through my eyes and mind and body. Something powerful can cross over. Since the ideological and social fundaments of the language into which I translate are not the same as those of the language from which I translate, there is a lot that cannot cross over. Only, perhaps, be explained. Though I find explanations usually diminish the situation, so I tend to avoid them. And go for the visceral and intellectual transfer: what languages share, because people share. And discover, or uncover correlates to the words that can transmit the poem into the other language. That’s a process of translation that a machine can’t emulate!

FB: Signification is a fascinating concept, that there is the word and then there is what that word signifies. When trying to go for what languages share, do you ever find yourself grasping for unattainable words or teetering towards incomprehensibility? Do you ever feel like you are performing ‘Adam’ in the act of renaming and redefinition?

EM: You squirm. It is infinitely fascinating. I don’t feel I am playing Adam, I am just chorusing. My voice bounces back off the wall, or is drowned in the sweater of the person beside me. 

I feel rather that I teeter toward what is just on the far side of comprehension, to expand our powers to comprehend. And to listen.

FB: Virginia Woolf set out to express “life itself” in her writing. Henry Miller looked for “the vital thing” when thinking about his writing although never quite knowing what this thing was. I wonder if for you there is a vital thing in your writing, something that has to be there for it to work. Tell us what moves you to write.

EM:  Movement in language that takes me to a place or space that differs (and defers) from what language has been able to do, an opening to a “something else” that perturbs what I know or think I know.

There’s a vitality in that process that can’t be matched!

It brings me back to thinking about translation again, for in translation that
space can often be reached or touched; that space of unknowing yet of
reverberation.

FB: Yes! You are pointing towards the capacity for language to transform or recreate reality. We just need the tools to unlock the box.

You have also spoken about the importance of “resonance” in writing poetry. Can you elaborate on what “resonance” means to you?

EM: Resonance means to allow language itself the room to project, glow, move, refract without trying to pin down words to one meaning, without trying to shut down meaning (which is always multiple and full, contradictory and incomprehensible) into one narrow track so as to valorize “the author” or “the author’s voice.”

For the writer, it involves listening to the reverberation of sounds and senses in the words they call on and learning from them, and going where they point. And revising, but much later on, once the work has had a chance to grow.

FB: Yes, words yearn for collaboration, we long to close the gap between ourselves and the world. In Gertrude Stein’s words, “I like the feeling of words doing/ as they want to do and as they have to do.” What happens though, when words fail us?

EM: Ah, many things, including more words! Words fail us all the time; it is part of their role, and their beauty. They show us the betweens and the movements instead of closing gaps, really.

FB: Can you speak more about “poetry as material practice”?

EM: Words look beautiful, letters are beautiful. We can move words about on the page and they mean differently, we hear them differently. I mean, I guess, letting language speak and listening to it, while regarding the page or screen as a physical support and its spaces as part of the poem that we are engaged in writing.

It means being able to work with the differing resonances in words that we move or adjust on the page, listening to what happens rather than trying to “express ourselves.” Which is always a diminution of what language is and can do.

It means also thinking of the embodied nature of the voice, and of the instruments of language articulation, of performance (in the sense Judith Butler might give it, and in the most obvious sense).

FB: Along with translation and other concerns, you have also considered the female experience in your writing. I’m thinking here of the particular poem, “The Beauty of Furs” and “The Beauty of Furs: Site Glossary” in WSW (West South West), a distinctly feminist text. In those poems, language became an attempt to construct female identification to the body in a world defined under the precepts of a catholic and therefore patriarchal reality. This reads in the poem not only as what one must put on—physically through the furs, but also what women endure by giving birth. It is an extremely powerful poem. Do you begin writing a poem as a domestic space that must be ruptured or subverted? Or do you simply want to express female experiences for others?

EM: I think these spaces around one (the domestic) are always already under rupture; I try to let those ruptures be visible without sealing them over in a lyric whole (though I do not dismiss lyric, quite the contrary). And I go with Galician poet Chus Pato, to write a poetry that produces and does not simply express. Productive, rather than expressive.

FB: Adding to this, you and Robert Majzels translated some of Nicole Brossard’s poems for Vallum’s last issue. What is the importance of representing or bringing to light another female poet’s work that may not be read if English is the reader’s only familiar language?

EM: Brossard’s vision of world, being, language, female and lesbian sexuality, earthly destruction, the possibilities for movement among the young, the febrility of one person thinking and being in a street beside other persons, is an amazing vision to bring into English. And to bring into a shared English created not just by myself but by “the person” who exists in language thanks to a working relation between Moure and Robert Majzels.  And then, of course, Nicole Brossard herself reads those words we wrote aloud, as her words. She has a big audience in the English-speaking world.

In fact, Brossard’s feminist work has long been critical to readers and writers in English Canada and, more recently, in the United States, in Mexico, in Catalunya, in Spain, in France, in Belgium, in Italy, etc. Her early and brave speaking of lesbian desire and the effect/infect/refract of that in culture and language has made the work of the rest of us women of my generation possible.

Translating Brossard into English is a gift. I just do it to share that gift with others who need gifts in our terrible economy of commodities.

FB: Your reflection on Brossard’s work reminds me of Phyllis Webb’s “Naked Poems”. Did Canadian poets such as Webb, P.K. Page, Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen pave a path for you as a writer? Are there still discrepancies in being recognized as a female writer in a male-dominated field? What else makes your work possible, female or otherwise?

EM: As you yourself say, the field of publishing, and reviewing, is still male-dominated, and I find that situation worse elsewhere than in Canada, though things have also slipped somewhat in Canada. Slip and rise. We need more people, men and women, like recently appointed Globe and Mail books editor Jared Bland, and like Lemon Hound’s Sina Queryas, who are determined to keep an eye on the proportions and make sure women’s work doesn’t fall by the wayside. We also need more writers to ask questions when they are invited to events, and to suggest other writers when the gender balance is too lopsided. Both women and men need to point out when imbalances exist, and not be complicit with them.

That said, reading poetry by P.K. Page and Margaret Atwood, Phyllis Webb, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Miriam Waddington, Elizabeth Brewster, Claire Harris, Anne Marriott, Anne Szumigalski, Daphne Marlatt was very critical to me and to my sense of possibility as a writer. As well, my feminist contemporaries such as Bronwen Wallace, Mary di Michele, Lorna Crozier, and male writers such as Phil Hall, Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Colin Browne were very important to my developing sense of the possible; they too in their writing raised issues about representation, history, mentoring, in the 1980s in different ways.

Really I think of poetry as a conversation, and the work of others in poetry, in editing, in commentary, enables mine. Lisa Robertson, Susan Clark, Norma Cole, Sharon Thesen, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Chus Pato, Caroline Bergvall, Barbara Guest, Myung Mi Kim, Rozalie Hirs, Laura Mullen: my work wouldn’t be possible without the contemporary work of women writers such as these. And it wouldn’t continue to be possible without the younger generation of women poets now producing amazing work: Oana Avasilichioaei, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Angela Carr, Margaret Christakos, Shannon Maguire, Nicole Markotić, Rachel Zolf, to name but a few.

FB: Where do you feel you get the most support for your writing? Is it from the envisaged vehicles of Canadian culture (The Governor General’s Award, The CBC Lit Awards, etc…) or from your peers? Perhaps it comes from some place else?

EM: My peers here in Canada and abroad, women and men, common beings, as Chus Pato might say, are my greatest support. Between us we share a panoply of concerns and passions in languages and poetries and productions and in visual art, curatorial and critical practice, translation, music, architecture, ecology. And reading excellent books in many languages, for whether the authors are alive or dead, the work remains contemporary. And being aware of the stakes in poetries that are not my own, and are not just located in the “present.” All that, and the sky.

I also feel the strong and cordial support of readers, who are people outside the production of a work in some senses, but in others, they are very much a part of the production of meaning. Their readings, the links they make, what they accept and what they refuse, is all interesting to me, and social media makes our conversations more possible.

FB: Your most recent book of poetry deals with translation as a process, and dying as process. In The Unmemntioable, death transforms the speaker, in the same way that language is transformative. Through reading the poems, we are touched by the ineffable that arises when attempting to articulate death. Is it because we lose language in that final moment of conversion? Does the misspelling or alteration of the title, The Unmemntioable, result from this loss?

EM: It is an irrevocable fact that we cannot report on our own death; facing death is to face a place where language will fail us. The alteration of the word that forms the title of the book indicates physically and materially in the word itself what the word means. For something to be merely “unmentionable” means it can and has already been mentioned. The alteration erases that particular mentionability and allows The Unmemntioable to speak for itself.

FB: We are told to “write what we know.” What is your take on the fairly new form of literature centred on Internet culture called “Alt-Lit”? If all we know comes from reading our Twitter feed for hours, there becomes an insatiable hunger for self-reflective prose. Is this a good thing? Or do we lapse into a kind of narcissism?

EM: There is a risk of narcissism. Or, more accurately, perhaps, a kind of presentism. Todayism. Based on an unthinking belief that time is linear and bears us onward.  I argue more for the achronological, the anachronic. We learn more about time from exploring what goes against our own. Yet the internet also makes work accessible from all times in ways it never was before. So there’s no hard and fast proclamation to be gleaned from my words here.

What do I know? Elisa Sampedrín in The Unmemntioable tries to explore experience and define it, and finds she can’t do it on her own, as she lacks “an interior.” We who are not invented do have interiors, un for intérieur. How do we encounter world and worldliness? Partly through words, for words precede us in our experiences.

I don’t think I would tell people to “write what you know.” It sounds like a way of saying “never leave the box where you are comfortable.” Rather, as Lisa Robertson has said, you have to write just beyond what you already know. And you have to listen to language and let it work and reverberate. Then you’ll learn something new, and your readers will, too.

FB: Can we also encounter the world, like Elisa, through our exterior? Merleau-Ponty claimed that the body is the bearer of meaning. The idea of being bodily occurs-pre-linguistically, before language. Are you ever inspired by the experience of bodily sensation first?

EM: The body, though, definitely has an interior. And the division between inside and outside is not as clear as it might seem. Bodily sensations definitely can be a starting point for writing, but without language how would you describe them? You only start to know what a body is when you begin to get language for it; otherwise, it’s not extricable from what is around it. Body is a reified term, in that sense. Merleau-Ponty has written probingly on the body-subject, as have others.

Elisa S’s problem is that she has no interior, partly because she has no parents, she’s a figment. That’s why she tries to investigate “experience.” Because experience, for her, is very difficult, nigh impossible. She has to observe someone else, and chooses E.M. (and in doing, provokes the question of what experience and history are for any of us, for all of us).

FB: Speaking of interiors and exteriors, is nature important to you when getting down to write? Can we separate the urban from the natural world when landscape can be redefined as a synthetic product of human interest? The poem is also artificial, a product with a not-so-invisible hand…

EM: I share your views here. Nature is already unnatural. That said, there are still rabbits running wild on the lawns of Calgary. To an animal, nature is where it lives, it doesn’t separate. And a leaf speaks. As Robert Majzels has said, even bacteria are already writing poems of their own. A lot of talk about nature poetry is a colonization of that nature (the one a rabbit lives in) by humans; its fundamental character is its unnaturality.

FB:  What is the importance of doing things with your hands that aren’t writing? Do you practice other art forms?

EM: Hands are pretty vital, more vital than feet and legs, which can be replaced by wheels or prostheses more easily. I cook food, which is another art form. I love to invent combinations with food (right now I am eating little batons of white turnip gently steamed with a few drops of sesame oil and sprinkled with poppy seeds). And I write with pencil in notebooks.

FB: Do you write longhand, then?

EM: I write longhand, and on the computer. I scribble a lot in notebooks… and in other peoples’ books, and on envelopes, bits of saved paper, napkins. I enjoy handwriting even though my script is almost illegible, even to me. It makes me think hard about words, their connections to each other. At the same time, I like to write / compose and see how text looks on the page at the moment of composition, as well, which means using the computer.

FB: Speaking of technology, do you have a stance on the print/online debate? Should we keep the physical book for its fetishized artful qualities or will it become obsolete? There surely seems to be a nostalgic resurgence for all things vintage and tangible as the online world proliferates.

EM: Books will always exist and I love books but I do not always need to have everything in book form. I love the access to reading that the internet allows us. The access to old books and dictionaries from the Bodleian Library via Google Books, for example.

I hope though that the books of the future will be more beautiful and more carefully made. The cheap book is really better read on an iPad or reader, if you ask me. Yet you can leaf through a book in a way that a screen doesn’t let you… you can be achronic in a book… and because hands have many fingers you can hold many places in a book simultaneously in your reading. And you can readily open anywhere and read in the wrong order. A book is a beautiful thing. Its physical design can really help you enter the contents and challenges in the text. I’m reading François Turcot’s Mon Dinosaure right now, and I have to say, La Peuplade makes beautiful books. Mass-produced, but beautiful. Everything about the type and spacing and feel and cover has been attended to.

FB: What are you working on at the moment? Are you at liberty to discuss?

EM: Oh, that’s usually clear from Facebook! I just finished a third draft of the English translation of Chus Pato’s new (just back from the printers) book of poetry, Flesh of Leviathan, though the translation won’t appear till 2016 or so. And I am looking for dramaturgical help with my play Kapusta, which I finished last year and I expect to appear as a book of poems in 2015. Just finished a draft of Insecession, my poetic response to Pato’s Secession.  It will appear from BookThug in 2014 in a facing page edition with my translation of Secession, and at the moment is in the editing process as my part of the manuscript requires more work. And I am preparing to find a collaborator who speaks and translates Tsuu’tina or Dane-zaa so that we can translate Brazilian Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea for English readers… it’s a trilingual border book in Portunhol and Guárani. I’ll be working on that project next winter when I am Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and will be also working on a new book of poems, tentatively titled The Elements. As well, I will help launch the French translation (by Daniel Canty, out from Le Noroît) of Little Theatres, Petits théâtres, this fall.

FB: Must one be ruthless when writing a poem? Should we reserve the right to tell lies?

EM: Ha! Perhaps all we can do is ruthlessly tell untruths. Especially when the truth is generally an invention anyhow, in many ways; to arrive at a truth, much must be suppressed. Sometimes this suppression is useful and good, sometimes it is not. I hear the voice of Simone Weil here, who wrote: “The opposite of truth, which is untruth, may not be a lie.”

FB: Michael Ondaatje’s long poem “Tin Roof” asks, “Do you want to be happy and write?” posing it as a kind of impossibility.

EM: I am, plutôt, immersed. Agitated, engaged, driven to the edge and over. Some people might find that a torment, but I rather like it. It makes me happy.

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FRANCESCA BIANCO graduated from McGill with a BA in English Literature. She intense to pursue an MFA in poetry or screenwriting when the time is right. One day, with any luck or alchemy, she will turn a poem into a film.

Montrealer ERÍN MOURE is busy working. 2012: The Unmemntioable (Anansi). 2013: translations of White Piano (Coach House) by Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) from French, and Galician Songs (Small Stations) by Rosalía de Castro, from Galician. 2014: Insecession, an autobiopoetics, will face Moure’s translation from Galician of Chus Pato’s autobiopoetics, Secession (Book Thug).

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To view other content published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Featured Interview: Ariel Gordon

Interview with Ariel Gordon
By Sharon Caseburg

Sharon Caseburg: Much of your writing considers landscapes. In what
kind of landscape do you find the most inspiration—urban or rural?

Ariel Gordon: I’m most comfortable in the transition zone between urban
and rural. Take Assiniboine Forest, for instance, which is 287 hectares of
aspen parkland in Winnipeg’s south end. It has all the problems of the
community surrounding it: poor drainage, teenagers with paintball guns,
pollution. It floods in the spring, is full of poorly constructed tree-forts,
and its trees are stressed. But it’s this patch of woods located within city
limits with a field and a pond that has somehow never been commercially
developed. The city lays down mulch paths and performs managed burns
when invasive species begin to outperform native plants, but unlike most
other parks, it’s pretty much left alone. Trees rot where they fall. This is
magnificent for mushrooms, a particular favourite of mine. They’re episo-
dic, like poems: they appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly unless
attended to by someone with a camera … or a notebook. Fungi like stressed
trees, rotting logs, and mulch paths. But notice, please, that two of those
situations are produced by human intervention, even in this ‘wild’ space.

The forest is full of lovely contradictions. Deer bed down between trem-
bling aspens but are canny enough to realize that the rusted out shell of an
old car provides a good windbreak. Lost moose lurk in the stubbly clearing
where a small plane crashed. And monarchs emerge from chrysalises near
the CPR line at the far end of the forest.

I think it’s the contradictions that make me so comfortable there. I grew up
in suburban Winnipeg, but our family vacations were spent in Minaki, in
a cabin with kerosene lamps on the walls and an outhouse. The property
was on an island with only a few other inhabitants that was only reach-
able by boat, which provided a measure of isolation from the Lake-of-the-
Woods ‘tourism experience,’ but we could still go to town for groceries.

The great majority of my poems are set in these kinds of spaces and often
actively explore them, but the closest I could ever come to pinning a label
on them was ‘urban/nature/love poems.’

SC: I’ve only known you to live a more urban than suburban lifestyle. What
does one have that is preferential to the other? How does that figure into
your daily creative process?

AG: I grew up in a house on the river, which meant that our basement
flooded semi-regularly and that you’d see deer and ducks and even foxes
on the riverbank corridor—so again, always, wild/tame.

But as I got older, my sensibilities shifted. We had this really interesting
back yard but the front streets were all long dusty blocks. Downtown was
concentrated, with many things existing and co-existing. When it came
time to go to school I chose the small downtown activist university over
the large suburban university. My first house was in a bad old neighbour-
hood in Winnipeg’s downtown. It was one of five houses in a row that were
derelict and had been derelict for years. It was our street’s row of rotten
teeth until the federal government offered funding to renovate housing
stock in low-income neighbourhoods. We bought one of the first reno-
vated homes and lived there nearly a decade … which made me aware of
all kinds of things I’d been taking for granted in my life and in my writing. It
also complicated everything, of course.

If you look at my first book, Hump (Palimpsest Press, 2010) as a barom-
eter of my influences—urban, rural, and suburban—nine poems were set
in Assiniboine Forest, with a further two in other green spaces. Nine po-
ems have urban settings. And a further sixteen poems were set in and
around that first house, which I guess you could call ‘urban domestic.’

SC: How does the constructed landscape of the city figure into your writ-
ing process? Are you more at ease in an urban environment, freer with
your language and your own poetic constructs, or do you prefer to write
and produce poetry in a more rural environment?

AG: What I like about Winnipeg in particular is that, like Assiniboine
Forest, it is neither completely urban nor rural. We have a few glassy sky-
scrapers and a good collection of grand old buildings with ornate facades,
but we also have an elm canopy comprised of approximately 160,000
trees. Sitting in the nosebleed section of the old Bomber stadium one July,
I was quite thrilled to look down and see the city disappear under the trees.

I also quite like the fact that the reason we have those grand old buildings
at all is because Winnipeg never recovered from the first World War, the
1919 General Strike, the dirty thirties. It was no longer the “Chicago of
the North” or even the “Gateway to the West.” Calgary and Vancouver
became enduring boomtowns, cities full of ambitious or even just rest-
less Winnipeggers. If you’re a boomtown, everything has to be bright and
shiny. So your buildings get knocked down every generation and bigger
shinier ones get put up in their places. Because Winnipeg was anything
but a boomtown for so long, we kept the buildings in our mercantile neigh-
bourhood, The Exchange District, some of which were derelict but many
of which were transformed into artists’ studios and galleries and cafes,
which, taken together, create something … interesting.

That said, although I’ve worked and lived downtown, I have never rented a
studio in a made-over factory or camped out in a tin-ceiling-ed coffee shop.
I have, however, scribbled first drafts in my notebook in the car while my
partner drives. For me, the serious work of writing—research, writing and
then re-writing—has always taken place at home, which right now means
my dining room table in our house in Wolseley—Winnipeg’s granola belt.
Wolseley has strange old houses and green spaces and functions as an ad-
junct to downtown. I can’t imagine, anymore, living very far from downtown.

Even though I get most of my writing done in the every day, during bought-and-
paid-for writing days, I also travel to writing retreats and extended work-
shops. Like those offered by the Sage Hill Writing Experience
and the Wallace Stegner House, for instance, both of which are situated in
rural Saskatchewan. I’ve also done an overseas retreat at Hawthornden
Castle Writers Retreat just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland.

SC: How do these types of environments aid or hinder your creative process?
What hidden discoveries have you made in these types of environments?

AG: I don’t always get a lot of writing done while on retreat, but that’s
because you can’t always schedule a surge of first-draft writing the way
you can schedule a retreat. But I always get in lots of editing and reading
and thinking and I somehow always manage to find trees to scrabble under
for mushrooms. And I always take away a writing friend or two, which is
invaluable to my writing life if not my writing.

I’d like to blithely say that I can write anywhere—urban or rural—but I
am sensitive to my environment. It took me a week, a potted plant from
Safeway and a stolen poster to get comfortable enough in my room at the
Banff Centre to do any writing there. And I had to take down all the cru-
cifixes and images-of-god in my room at St. Michael’s Retreat Centre
and make/drink many cups of tea before I was able to get going on the project
I’d brought with me.

While retreats aren’t meant to be that stimulating in and of themselves,
I’ve enjoyed poking around in each site. When I was at Hawthornden, for
instance, another writer and I located a set of pictographs described in
nineteenth century travel accounts that the current administrator couldn’t
find. And my last stint at Sage Hill happened to be while the saskatoons
were ripe. I was walking from tree to tree, mouth full of berries, and nearly
stepped on a fawn that had been hidden in the middle of the path. A few
days later I was nearly bowled over by a galloping deer.

SC: What is the appeal of the “hidden” or “unseen”?

AG: I have a journalism background and I think what journalists (and nov-
elists and non-fiction specialists and short story mavens) … and poets
have in common is an inclination to find out what’s behind the facades.
To rattle doorknobs and authority figures, even if the writer in question
doesn’t identify as an activist. So I don’t think it’s a question of “appeal”
so much as aptitude. Writers are, at their core, curious people. Every time I
sit down to write, I try for something “hidden” or “unseen,” whether that’s
a surprising image or combination of words and sounds or the subject of
the poem.

SC: Do you miss journalism?

AG: I miss journalism occasionally. Mostly when my partner, who’s a
photojournalist, comes home and says that he got to ride in a helicopter
or visit a remote community in the North or take a picture of a newborn
bison. Though I miss journalism, I’ve found that asking “how does it feel?”
via poetry is much more satisfying.

SC: Name five cities, five hidden treasures from those cities, and how their
discoveries shaped your writing.

AG: The soccer pitch in Winnipeg’s Memorial Park, where there are end-
less games of pick-up soccer in the summer, was the subject of my poem
“A year in: footsie” from Hump. The players are largely African immigrants
to the city. Driving by and seeing them there is endlessly reassuring to me.

The tattoo parlour in Bukit Tinggi, Indonesia, was washed clean by a to-
rrential rain but full of men smoking and drinking the darkest of dark cof-
fee and flipping through photocopied western tat mags. I described it in
one thread of my long poem “Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999”
(Rubicon Press, 2009). But the whole poem was about the hidden/un-
seen; six years after my sister and I travelled there, I discovered that our
great-grandfather was a Governor General of the Dutch East Indies, which
became Indonesia. And so the poem sets our experiences in Kuala Lumpur
and Bukit Tinggi against those of our ancestors in Jakarta and Aceh.

My partner and I went to Hong Kong and Yunnan province in China during
the SARS epidemic in summer 2003. We walked through a pop-
up ceramics market in Li-jiang just as awareness of SARS was spreading
throughout mainland China: police staring balefully at foreigners over sur-
gical masks, women turning their backs on you in the streets. And there
were these immense pots next to small delicate vases next to gold cats
covered in glitter. It became a part of my poem “Hawk,” which Jonathan
Ball published in his Martian Press Review chapbook.

When I was living in Halifax and Seoul, South Korea in my twenties—for
journalism school and teaching English respectively—I wrote poems. For
me, both cities were hundreds—if not thousands—of years older than my
hometown. I had to re-jig my conception of the city, of the possible oc-
cupants of its built landscape. I published a few poems here and there on
both cities, but … in the end, they wound up in what I call ‘the manuscript
of my twenties,’ which was retired from circulation more or less gracefully.

SC: You once undertook a project titled Wrought Substance in which you
and a photographer entered into a poetic and photographic discussion
about urban decay and derelict buildings. Can you tell us about that project?

AG: For many years, I worked on a poetry/photography project with Jon
Schledewitz focused on five or six of Winnipeg’s derelict buildings. These
buildings—hotels and factories and homes—weren’t hidden treasures.
Winnipeggers were, if anything, overly familiar with them. These hulks had
always been there and they’d always be there, because their absentee
landlords couldn’t be bothered to pull them down and the land wasn’t
worth much. People couldn’t see past the boarded-up windows and the
kicked-in doors … it was hard enough for me to see them as something
other than what they’d become.

So, as a part of the writing process, I tried to find out who had built them
and who had inhabited them over the years and also talk a bit about the
neighbourhoods they were situated in. Part of that research involved
spending time in or near the buildings. Sometimes I talked my way into
buildings as they were being demolished, sometimes I endlessly walked
their perimeters, sometimes I climbed fences. I found the websites of
urban explorers, so I got to look inside buildings I was too timid to explore
myself. Part of that research was consulting archives and libraries and
organizations that had once occupied the buildings. I interviewed an
elderly woman over tea for the poems on the Salvation Army Citadel. I
pored over the Henderson Directories for the names and occupations of
the people who once lived in the derelict house next to mine.

SC: What did you hope to accomplish with Wrought Substance, and why
was it abandoned in the end?

AG: I was hoping to write a social history of Winnipeg in verse that would
talk as much about people as about architecture. Heritage-building folk tend
towards ‘Oh, isn’t it sad that these buildings are crumbling! We must
save them!’ without acknowledging the neighbourhoods the buildings are
in, and what function they might serve in those neighbourhoods. Descrip-
tions of the structures tend to focus on the big-wigs that built them in
Winnipeg’s golden age of ‘Progress! Prosperity! And Industry!’ And I want-
ed to talk back to that a bit.

But to write about the neighbourhoods that the buildings were in, to talk
about the people who lived in those neighbourhoods, I had to encounter
homelessness and [sex work] and mental illness. Violence and addiction.
I just didn’t have the tools, as a young poet and as someone from a middle-
class suburban background. I couldn’t ever get away from that fact that I was
choosing to live downtown. It was a locked door I rattled in the poetry. And
so I turned to first-person accounts, both recent and historical, and included
portions of them in poems.

We published poems/images from the series here and there but stopped
working on it in a concentrated way when I became pregnant. After my
daughter arrived, it was much more difficult to find time to loiter in vacant
lots. Also, writing about pregnancy and mothering completely hijacked my
writing practice. I think the last straw was when the photographer moved
away. Since that time, many of the buildings we documented have finally—
finally—been demolished as Winnipeg experiences a mini-boom.

I think I might be able to move back into the project now. Everything the
poems attempt is still very important to me. As people say of derelict
buildings: they have such good bones!

SC: What are you currently working on?

AG: I’m currently compiling poems for my second collection. A piece
I’m presently engaged with is a poem called “The Heart is a Small Appliance.”
It is what I call a ‘value-added poem.’ It was sidebar to another poem
I was working on just before bed one night. I was already enervated
with poem-work when I turned out the light. I laid there, listening to the sound
of my partner snoring next to me against the coyotes barking somewhere
outside and lines started coming to me. So I turned the light back on and
started writing them down, because you never get to keep those lines
overnight. Specifically, the poem is my long-delayed response to Winnipeg
crime writer Michael Van Rooy’s death, at 42, of a heart attack. I was more
angry than sad when he died. It was, in a word, criminal. If anyone knew
Winnipeg, its back alleys and carriage lanes and bike paths, it was Michael.

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SHARON CASEBURG is a Canadian writer, editor and book designer. Her
poetry and critical writing have appeared in numerous publications, including
sleepwalking, a long poem chapbook published by JackPine Press. She is the
co-founder of the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

ARIEL GORDON is a Winnipeg-based writer. Her first book, Hump
(Kingsville: Palimpsest Press), won the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for
Poetry in 2011. Most recently, she collaborated with designer Julia Michaud
on the disaster DIY chapbook How To Prepare For Flooding (Saskatoon:
JackPine Press). When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the
woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

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To view other content published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Vallum is now accepting original and previously unpublished chapbook submissions for the annual Vallum Chapbook Award 2017. For more information and guidelines, visit the Chapbook rules page. 

Featured Interview: Bill Bissett

Thoughts by bill bissett; interviewed by Dave Eso

dave eso: In a battle for the right to take YOU to prom, who would win your arm: the sun or the moon? How so?

bill bissett: in a battul 2 take me 2 th prom probableet h moon wud def have wun 2 take me 2 th prom 4 a long time now mor latelee it wud b th sun winning that battul tho in most liklihood i wudint b going 2 th prom as a metaphor tho sure fr sure n now mor th sun thn th moon literalee ium mor uv a day prson thn i usd 2 b tho as in pomes 4 yoshi who can xplain th sun th moon n th stars who can xplain th rain

de: How does approaching a canvas feel different from approaching a page?

bb: how it is 4 me approaching a canvas can b veree diffrent thn approaching a page mostlee its th prolong ing nuans wuns yr in from th start tho th word approach yu reelee dew approach th canvas mostlee standing up n walking 2ward th canvas n with a painting thn its way mor physikal th whol bodee veree oftn n th arm th wide long stroke sumtines veree mor physikul n colour way mor colour 2 approach is a leep in2 th void sames with writing along similar jumping pathwayze similar n diffrent as gertrude stein sd evreething is th same n evreething is diffrent with writing yu reelee ar deeling with th sircutree uv grammar uv langwage simlariteez ar words ar originalee piktographik each lettr is n yu feel th pickshurs thru them as yu write paintings start with th line or th pickshur first veree oftn tho not alwayze thr is no alwayze n yu feel th charaktr uv th caligraphee aftr or during n its sew much th start up with paintings its mostlee th whol bodee involvd with writing its th brain th arms with th typing n remembring 2 try 2 hold yr bellee in sumtimes whil yu write neithr is like swimming or peeling carrots tho painting is mor like swimming n writing is mor like peeling carrots how yu approach th void th abyss jumping in2 it yr heart is in yr mouth veree oftn wher its most effektiv as yu want 2 take deep breths whil dewing as both writing n painting ar connketing with yr breething yes

de: We know from the nfb documentary, very precisely, what your feelings were about your job at the VPL. Could you comment on some other jobs you’ve held over the decades and what those meant, made you feel, think, be, etc?

bb: my first job was at a gas staysyun in halifax pumping gas dewing lube n grees jobs evreething gettin th car up n goin undr my second job was at bligh radio on quinpool road also in halifax nova scotia selling records callas was huge classikul demos in th bank room elsvis was huge as well diane oxner was a co-workr wundrful singr also barbara byrne who latr brillyantlee playd mozarts mothr in law in amadeus that great film they wer both wundrful as was our boss mrs bligh i wud go on th radio n b a young prson who lovd klassikul mewsik n alternatelee a young huge fan uv countree n or rock thats whn i bcame also a huge fan uv billbord n varietee magazeens n still 2 ths day need 2 know th grosses n puzzul ovr what they meen whn i arrivd in vancouvr i shelvd books at th vancouvr publik libraree wch was thn on burrard st at robson thn off n on tutoring n running errands putting packages in strategik places delivreez n whn i was part uv a yung familee hous painting with lance farrell on laddrs n evreething lerning 2 dew th most inside part uv th trim on th windows b4 th closr parts uv th trim n in thos yeers being kidnappd n forsd 2 pick beens in a plantaysyun in mexico also circa that ditch digging 4 a whil in van

my first writr in resdiens job was at western u in london ontario n thn writr in libraree in woodstock ontario n from much erleer i bcame a volunteer in th art world helping 2 put up art shows n in 62 i startid blewointmentpress wch continued til 80 sew manee books sew much planning sew much collating all thees jobs n mor involvd working sew much with my hands yes n sum agilitee tho not as much as dansing wch was my first ambishyun but aftr 2 yeers uv operaysyuns 12 ops on my bellee i wud b not great at lifting or jumpinbg sew i bgan 2 want 2 write n paint n that way cud still feel th line moov thru space wch 4 me was veree thrilling latelee i was writr in residens at guelph u that was 08-09 n thn 10-13 at workman arts heer in toronto iuv lovd all thees jobs they all enrich each othr sew much whats next i dont know xcellent

de: What keeps you busy these days?

bb: thees dayze ium bizee with working on my nu book uv poetree n soon will b proof reeding th galleez uv my recent book 2 b releesd in spring 13 from talonbooks calld hungree throat a lot uv th writing in it its my second novel ths time a novel in meditaysyun is text uv vokal work play with mewsik uv pete dako on recentlee releesd cd pete dako n me have dun calld nothing will hurt wch will have a follow up cd calld as well hungree throat next yeer agen pete dako musician composr n arrangr n myself word n delivree thats us words n mewsik pete dako is amayzing

what els dewing nu paintings wch i show at th secret handshake art galleree heer in toronto n prepping nu texts n guides 4 th upcumming poetree workshop finding our voices nu n usd at workman arts also in toronto wher ium th poet in residens ther workman arts is a companee devotid 2 all th arts 4 membrs who have xperiensd brushes with addicksyun n or mental health issews who alredee ar artists n have xperiensd interrupsyuns or want 2 bcum artists

th secret handshake 4 wch ium tresurer was foundid n creatid by jordan stone it is a peer support group th onlee wun probablee uv its kind aneewher run 4 n by peopul with schizophrenia run by its membrs its amayzing as well n involvs a lot uv lerning n unlerning

also i try 2 go swimming twice a week n meditate evree morning n dew tai chi also evree morning all thees aktiviteez help 2 keep proaktiv in as manee wayze as possibul

also dewing reedings n having sumtimes travelling art shows with reedings as recentlee happend in victoria at th superior n th well ther n in ottawa last wintr

i put postrs up all ovr qween west n bloor street stretching from ossington 2 bathurst book stores n art gallereez n at camh 4 events at th secret handshake sew all thats great 4 walking n 4 outreech last sunday uv evree month at leest is reeding nite at th secret handshake galleree club hous

de: A friend and I started up an investigation the other night and we hope you’ll help. We came up with 11 ways to go crazy / and only 6 ways to go sane. This troubled us. I’m pretty sure we covered all bases in the first category. Do you have any strategies for sanity you could add? As it stands, our ways to go crazy are: LOVE, drugs, trauma, disease, travel, isolation, sleep deprivation, insects, paranoia, broken-shoelace syndrome (one more trivial problem tips the balance and breaks the mental back) and faustism/hopeless quests. Ways to go sane: Hold the Line, Ride the Wave, Community, Meditation, exercise and stop making lists.

bb: binaree definishsyuns ar veree binaree n veree trikee that is onlee 2 sidid abstrakt nouns ar in opposit relaysyunship with aneething n ar ms n mr leeding alwayze seems 2 me up down gud bad crazee or in sane n sane duz insane meen inside sane in out i dew undrstand what yu ar saying tho as well as wanting 2 deekonstrukt what yu ar saying i work in th mental health field n i find altho not dfensiv abt thees binaree abstraksyuns they ar not as kleer as they cud seem 2 b i like yr list 4 losing it is what i wud call crazee tho also what is losing it it mite b a way uv finding that is thrilling or reelee innovativ sirtinlee i wud rank isolaysyuin as hi up in that list as a caws thats me tho whn we dew aneething hurtful 2 othrs it reelee is losing kontrol uv wuns self n bcumming embrogliatid in diffrent n multipul strands uv kodependenseez but evn manee normativ peopul get lost n unfound in thos mayze n mayzeeness its th i know what yr saying respnses that can b troubling yes

i wud put meditaysyun in th list fr sure uv what can help us bcum less obsessiv or paranoid or controlling or wanting 2 b controlld whatevr it is meditaysyun can help us not xpekt othrs 2 pleez us or us b sew pleezing as a goal 2 us its all nuances uv kours also tai chi helps restore innr balansing n swimming n othr forms uv xercise i wud say yes its th practise uv working on playing with innr balansing that liberates us from self sabotage or sabotage on othrs as well or th sabotage uv th self thr reelee is no sanitee as long as thr is kontrolling or fighting or jelousee or envee n meditaysyun n xercise dew n can bring us 2 ourselvs wher we can let go living a few dayze at a time in th countree or mor thn a few dayze at a time can also bring what they usd 2 call pees uv mind i find n if yr a writr write n if yr a paintr paint thats my add ons or ammendments with yr xcellent lists that in manee wayze thr may not b as manee diffrenses btween in sane n sane as peopul in general wud like 2 think dew our politikul leedrs around th world bhave sanelee hmmmm

de: Who were your artistic mentors? Have you mentored younger artists? If yes, what was that experience like? Can the creation of art be learned? MA programs in creative writing are springing up all over, most recently in Saskatoon, but many poets think there is no point in trying to learn the craft. What are your thoughts?

bb: mentor mentora my first mentor was my mothr who was reeding rachael carsons th silent spring n my mothr xplaind 2 me our human specees was ruining th erth evelyn who was brillyant nurs 4 me with tubes running in n out uv me n in th oxygen tent i desisid 2 write n paint that oxygen tent def mentord me as with writing n painting i cud still feel th line mooving thru space as i cud no longr xpekt 2 b a dansr going 2 ballet school evreething is a mentor evreething evreewun is an influens maude who was our houskeepr n whom i lovd as well i wud help her dew th kleening n we wud listn 2 duke ellington sarah vaughan billy ekstine ella fitzerald dinah washington george sheering as we kleend whn my mothr went 2 spirit wch tuk me yeers 2 get ovr as erthlings say my fathr let maude go 2 save munee she n i had bin veree close that was a doubul blow 2 me n my sistrs went away n i did th kleening n kooking all uv wch i lernd 2 dew from maude my next mentor reelee was bob davis th oldr brothr uv art davis wun uv my best frends he had gone 2 europe n brot back with him names uv artists n writrs picasso chagall sartre debeauvoir gide camus kandinsky renoir evreewun he told art abt thees peopuls works n art told me n thn i was alwayze at th libraree getting out theyr art books n gayzing n studeeing n lerning lerning at th libraree i wud also get out books by tennesee williams lillian hellman eugene o’neil arthur miller william inge all thees great writrs n mor bcame mentors 2 me n th biggest mentor uv all whn i got 2 vancouvr away from halifax aftr being away from lunaria my original home planet was along with marianne moore e.e. cummings n othrs was gertrude stein her work stanzas in meditations reelee awakend me sew much along with mrs reynolds tendr buttons three lives n othr great works awakend me 2 each word is n dusint need 2 alwayze represent thn latr at ubc warren tallman his third yeer poetree class wher we wud studee erth woman n watr woman 2 brillyant pomes uv denise levertovs how th sound n color agreementts n dissonans wud enhans each part uv th meening we also studeed yeats that way weeks on wun pome lapis lazuli that helpd us th students uv his mentoring 2 see n undrstand how that pome was made put 2gethr warren tallman also mentord me as a teechr frend 4 yeers helping me sew much 2 keep going raising munee 4 me whn i was undr attack by rite wing politishans raising th awarreness uv my work 2 withstand th onslaught he had me dew a reeding during thos dayze on th same bill as allen ginsberg wch was a huge thrill 4 me as allen ginsberg was also a huge mentor 4 me his great work howl changd my life sew did jack keroacs n michael mcclure n robert duncans n diane di prima ths kind uv bird flies backward as i set out from halifax with billie my first boy frend at 17 2 see n xperiens th world we ar reelee mentord by evreething evn ths darkning evning in august late n still in summr but i hope iuv mensyund sum uv th stellar mentors in my growing n writing life gertrude stein beng th biggest mentor uv my writing life

de: It seems to me that there is clear overlap between your early writing and some beat poets or post beat personalities. I’m thinking mainly of Lew Welch, Phillip Whalen, Richard Brautigan. Though clearly there is a separation also. Did you study Zen Buddhism at any point, as these other writers did? It seems to me the spirit of zen moves through your art, though I’ve never heard you specifically address it, as you have with shamanism.

bb: evree now n zen i cry whn its a zenfr i laff n oftn evree now n zen i smile with appresiaysyun uv thxcellens uv evreething inklewding th paradoxhes n th contradicksyuns whn it is xcellent wch is mor oftn thn not yes at leest heer in canada wch is brillyantlee muticultural n attempting th harmonee uv evreething class munee posisyun powr all n each uv evreething

th zen koan is it th moovment uv th flag in th wind or th wind it is th moovment uv yr mind lew welch i red a storee by him in th evrgreen review i lovd xcellent writr yes th othr poets yu mensyun all xcellent my favorits uv that gen trajekt allen ginsberg robert duncan denise levertov peter orlovsky taylor mead whn i was going 2 go 2 jail 4 possessyun in 68 it happend aftr a 3 yeer trial almost sumtimes living in hiding from th police as a phonee trial had bin riggd n i was gonna get maybe a ten spot i bettr lern meditaysun i thot sins naivelee i thot thr wudint b anee drugs inside well i drew onlee 3 months i thot it was 2 weeks but i met sumwun recentlee he had gone in with me n he sd i drew th 3 months who knows aneething fr sure aneeway as stond as i was whn i went in 2 jail i have bin meditating evr sins i first came across zen with th writings uv alan watts b4 i left halifax n thos writings along with jack kerouacs on th road n allen ginsbergs howl inspird me 2 leev or rathr reelee supportid me in leeving along with othrs n with studeeing philosophee at dalhousie undr george grant th idea that we ar 2 much led by binaree abstrakt nouns in all theyr dualisms was sirtinlee growing in me n helpin me out evreewun adapts 2 teechings uv kours n in theyr own wayze grows on

+

Primarily known as Canada’s ambassador to his home planet Lunaria, bill bissett is also an accomplished figure in literature and visual arts. Touted as the missing-link between the Beats and Hippies, bissett has inspired generations of Canadian poets to rage more excellently. His latest release is hungree throat (Talon Books, 2013).

To view other content published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Vallum 2016 Year in Poetry, Part 2

Yesterday we brought you Part 1 of our Year in Poetry questionnaire, in which we asked our recent contributors:

1) What was your Favourite Poetry Book?

2) What was your Discovery of the Year? and

3) What advice do you have for 2017?

We received so many thoughtful responses we couldn’t fit them all in one place, so without further ado, we bring you Part 2 of Vallum: Contemporary Poetry‘s Year in Poetry.

Mary Jo Bang

1. My favourite poetry book published in 2016 is The Wug Test by Jennifer Kronovet. Kronovet’s book is a correction to the bizarre idea being put forward recently by some that language doesn’t mean anything, that a politician can tell lies or utter hate speech and then say he or she was “just kidding,” or that someone can maintain that there are no “facts” and therefore politically self-serving statements must not be questioned.

As a reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote: “Rigorously intellectual and compassionate in its approachability, this second collection from Kronovet (Awayward), a 2015 National Poetry Series winner, employs linguistics research to probe how language makes ‘the world a glass we fill by speaking.’ There is a fierce and tender optimism in the notion that ‘a box can be// a word can be a ship can be/ the blank that takes us to each other.’ Tenderness is at the core of these poems, and Kronovet turns over each word carefully as only an attentive lover of language can.”

2. For me, there were two exciting discoveries of the year in poetry. One was via Vivian Pollak’s Our Emily Dickinsons (University of Pennsylvania Press). Pollak’s book examines Dickinson’s hold on the poetic imagination of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath. The book made me realize how radically misrepresented Dickinson has been by scholars and biographers who have often made her seem high-strung and neurasthenic, always speaking haltingly from behind a just-ajar door. Pollak gives us not one but many Emilys, none measured by neurotic insufficiency, but all living a robust poetic life—and an equally robust afterlife in which she profoundly influenced other strong women poets. The value of Vivian Pollak’s book, which I am certain will be lasting, is that by tracing her influence, Pollak reveals a Dickinson that is less fragile, more capable, more knowingly engaged in poetic de-familiarization.

The second discovery was via Terese Svoboda’s Anything that Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press). I had never read poems by Lola Ridge and yet, as Svoboda makes clear, I should have. Ridge was a major figure in American Modernism who enjoyed a wide readership during her lifetime, published many books, some of which won major prizes, and was a mentor to others poets whose work is still read today. Her work influenced Hart Crane, among others. I was rather stunned by how quickly and how completely she was forgotten after she died in 1941. She clearly deserves to be read and remembered. Without her, modernist history is incomplete.

3. More than ever before, we have to be diligent in speaking out against any attempt for people, especially politicians, to manipulate language in a manner that undermines fact and truth. We have to raise our voices to protect every kind of natural diversity—skin color, sexual identity, ethnicity, country of origin. We have to protect the rights of women to control their bodies and their minds. We have to ensure free public education. It’s a tall order, but if we fail to do any of these things, we will put the fabric of our society at risk. And if we don’t protect the air and water and land, we will destroy every hope we have for a future.

Mary Jo Bang‘s most recent collection of poems is The Last Two Seconds (2015, Graywolf Press); a new collection, A Doll for Throwing, will be published by Graywolf in August 2017. See Mary Jo’s poem “The Scurrying White Mice Disappear” in Vallum 13:2.

John Wall Barger

1. My favourite was The Deleted World, a tiny book of Tranströmer’s poems. The translations (by Robin Robertson) are good, but really I’ll take any excuse to revisit Tranströmer’s frozen visionary landscape. I love how he flashes from a personal detail to the earth to some (visionary) truth about existence: “I close my eyes. / There is a silent world, / there is a crack / where the dead / are smuggled over the border.” And he is not afraid, as so many of us are nowadays, of talking about the soul.

2. A friend recommended Alice Oswald. She’s amazing! Her new book, Falling Awake, packs a punch, but in a subtle, quiet, pensive way. I find I crave such poems, maybe because that energy is the opposite of my own. I love her delicious, delicate repetitions and music (“What is the word for wordless, when the ground / bursts into crickets?”). She has me staring at the hawks circling above our house, and writing aubades.

3. I just reread one of my favourite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s set in the US in 1850, “in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.” The language is so astoundingly fresh: King James archaisms, southern colloquialisms, apocalyptic metaphor, and more. As I read I kept wondering how in hell McCarthy did that. I mean, did he have a photographic memory, or had he collected thousands of quotes—I pictured his walls covered with taped Bible pages, fortune cookies, newspaper clippings, overheard phrases—to use in his books? Then it occurred to me: it’s all him, inventing, not copying. He’s inside that nomenclature. It never happened, nobody ever spoke that way, it’s his alone. It was a lightning bolt moment for me, about voice. Up to a point we collect and repeat, then we become the engine of our own unique diction.

In 2016, John Wall Barger came out with two chapbooks (“Samovar / Dukkha” (Baseline Press) and “The Vnfortunate Report & Tragicall Tidings of Leslie Barger” (Thee Hellbox Press)), and his poems are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Cimarron Review, Freefall, and Arc. See John’s poem “The Swans Flew Out of the Sun” in Vallum 13:1.

Lorna Crozier

1. Matthew Dickman’s Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Norton, 2012.

2. A new book that just came out with Frontenac House Poetry, Blood Orange by Heidi Garnett. Powerful, heart-breaking poems about the author’s family experience in WW2 Germany.

3. For 2017 I have no advice for anyone else, just for myself. To try to do the next right thing to stop the terrible destruction of our beautiful planet and the creatures who live here.

Lorna Crozier‘s The Wrong Cat (McClelland and Stewart, 2015) won the Pat Lowther Award and the Raymond Souster Award. See Lorna’s poem “Modesty” in Vallum 12:2.

Amanda Earl

1. Sandra Ridley, Silvija (Book Thug, 2016): dark, incantatory, potent & important work.

2. Adele Barclay (having first read a poem of hers in The Fiddlehead, then more online & finally in her first trade book: If I Were In A Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood Editions, 2016); another answer: Montreal as a hotbed of luscious & brilliant poets.

3. Write bad ass poems to try and help yourself & others cope with/distract yourself from the pending doom many of us feel now that we’re in a post-truth, post-compassion era. Make art & publish the art of outsiders. Let the inside eat its own tail.

Amanda Earl is working on a poetry manuscript entitled Grace: city poems under the influence of Barnes, Buckley, Cixous, Jacobs, the seasons, melancholy & gin. More info: AmandaEarl.com & on Twitter: @KikiFolle. See Amanda’s poem “Bedlam Spring” in Vallum 13:2.

Jill Jorgenson

1. Big shout-out to Robyn Sarah and her GG award-winning book My Shoes Are Killing Me.

2. Not a book, but indubitably poetry nonetheless: Jane Siberry’s CD Ulysses’ Purse. She is absolutely a poet, and these gorgeously accompanied sung-poems slow my breath and my heartbeat, induce a space of peace and calm.

3. Advice?? Well that feels audacious. About poetry, or just period? I feel inclined to want to put out there some nebulous, but fervent notions about Love and Oneness and Being in the Now, all substantially unhelpful “advice” indeed, so I’ll just say… Remember this paradox: everything matters, and none of it matters. It’s true.

Also, one further wisp of advice: check out the 2014 Cormorant release Looking East Over My Shoulder, by Jill Jorgenson. See Jill’s poem “Spit” in Vallum 12:2.

Richard Kelly Kemick

1. Michael Prior’s Model Disciple. 

2. I read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband for the FIRST TIME. Yes, I know––I’m a bit late to the party. But you know what, this Carson person isn’t half bad. I think she could really go places.

3. I’ve recently admitted that I like white wine better than red wine. I have a suspicion that everyone feels this way but “society” is keeping us down. My advice is to embrace white wine and admit it is, at the end of the day, the far better choice.

Richard Kelly Kemick‘s Caribou Run is out now on icehouse press. See Richard’s poem “Ode to What is Left Behind” in Vallum 10:2.

Adam Lawrence

1. Shane Neilson’s Meniscus (2009).

I admit, I liked the way the paper felt in my hands, but I also enjoyed the poems that explored sickness/healing. I’m a New Brunswick boy, too, like Neilson, and I was happy to see some allusions to Alden Nowlan–one of my favorite Atlantic Canadian poets.

2. Matt Robinson (from Halifax, NS). He’s quickly become one of my favourites. I got hooked by the title poem of the chapbook a fist made and then un-made (2013), and am happy to see he’s got a new collection out.

3. No. I’m always looking for wisdom, really, enjoying each new book as a new horizon, a new world–like Prospero says to Miranda in The Tempest: “‘Tis new to thee.”

Adam Lawrence‘s writing has appeared in Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, Salon, Vallum, and JSTOR Daily. See Adam’s poem “The Wish” in Vallum 13:1.

Blaine Marchand

1. And With Thy Spirit  by April Bulmer (Hidden Book Press, 2016). I have not read April’s work for many decades. Her latest book of poetry is an exploration of spirituality. This book is the work of a mature artist who knows her métier, who is gifted in her telling and brave with honesty.

2. physical by Andrew McMillan (Cape Poetry, 2015). A birthday gift and a wonderful one. He is a British poet of whom I was not aware. His work is a powerful voice speaking about gay male love.

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016). An important book even though I found it at times more polemic than poetic. The layout, which also conveys the central idea, is fantastic. What she says needs to be heard and considered.

3. A centuries old Shakespearean one – “To thine own self be true.” Keep on writing poetry in your own voice despite what others may say. Susan Glickman had an interesting post on Facebook – “accessible was now considered proof of insufficient artistry”. I have been thinking a lot about that since. In each generation, there are dominate poetic styles and each generation has the tendency to see the previous one’s as no longer relevant. Surely in the Canadian poetry scene, there is space for multiple voices and styles. All should be allowed to speak and given their due.

Blaine Marchand is currently working on two poetry manuscripts, Where You Dwell and My Head Filled With Pakistan, and a short story collection, Nomads. See Blaine’s poems “The Cracking of Foundations” and “The Stealth of Snow” in Vallum 13:1.

Cassidy McFadzean

1. Moez Surani’s Operations, a book-length poem that lists the names of military operations, truly underlines the power held by individual words. Since reading Operations, I’ve tried to be more precise in my use of language both in poetry and in everyday life.

2. I spent much of November reading the collected Lydia Davis, often holding in tears or laughter as I rode the bus to work.

3. It is more important than ever to read diverse books!

Cassidy McFadzean has new poems coming out in PRISM International, The Humber Literary Review, and Numéro Cinq. See Cassidy’s poem “American Harpy” in Vallum 13:2.

Ilona Martonfi

1. Jan Zwicky’s String Practice, Vallum chapbook. And Nox by Anne Carson.

2. Kelly Norah Drukker’s, Small Fires, published with McGill-Queen’s University Press

3. “Even if a line was brilliant and beautiful, if it’s not furthering the thrust and life of the poem, it needs to be cut.” –Ada Limón

Ilona Martonfi, author of The Snow Kimono, (Inanna Publications, 2015). Forthcoming, Salt Bride, (Inanna Publications, Spring 2019). See Ilona’s poem “Dandelion Snow” in Vallum 11:1.

Ruth Roach Pierson

1. Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

2. Olena Kalytiak Davis, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities (Copper Canyon Press, 2003/2014); And Her Soul Our of Nothing (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

3. Remember that poetry is solace for the soul, a powerful antidote to the madness of the politics that gives politics a bad name.

“I had the pleasure of reading poems with Maureen Hynes and John Reibetanz at an event sponsored by Larry Robin’s Moonstone Arts Centre in Philadelphia on September 30 and with a large group of Canadian poets at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC on October 9 and launching my second chapbook, Untranslatable Thought (Anstruther Press, 2016), at the Abbozzo Gallery in Toronto on October 15.” See Ruth’s poem “A Newfoundland Chimera” in Vallum 13:1.

Michael J. Shepley

1. For 2016, my unearthing in a clean up of the Billy Collins collection called Picnic, Lightning. I bought it with intent a couple years ago. Since I subtitled one of my efforts “after the style of B. Collins,” in that I had heard a couple of his humorous poems read on Prairie Home Companion, I decided to dig in. I liked the material, smooth as good whisky. But I have to elide that subtitle. He has humor, but Jazz and nature and, I’d say, a bit of melancholy are closer to his soul.

2. I read a good many poems, from little publications, to the New Yorker‘s, and the Poem A Day series. I am afraid I have an “existential” attention span. Like almost in one ear, out the other after a short pause. Though that word figure does not translate well to reading…

But a recent Poem A Day has me intending to dig up some William Carlos Williams because of the lines “a liquid moon/moves gently among/the long branches” and “the wise trees/stand sleeping/in the cold” since I like nature and season poems. (But I might have dumped cold for snows…don’t we all play the editor game?)

3. Like Mr. Natural- keep on truckin’ (I actually know a guy, Martin, who was a neighbor of the cartoonist R. Crumb when the guy fled the Bay Area for the bucolic life around Winters, CA. In fact I have met a couple older folk who claim to have played in Crumbs Rock band once upon a time. But old 60s gen memories are based in bent chops, so… I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the legend). The old phrase can be interpreted as keep working it. Like, for writing, do everyday, then repeat .

Since late 2014, Michael J. Shepley has had poems in print at CA Quarterly, Muse International, and Seems, and online at Danse Macabre, Penumbra, Xanadu, and Pinyon. See Michael’s poem “November’s End” in Vallum 13:2.

Jan Zwicky

1. I’ve read too many fine books this year to be able to specify a favourite. But I recently finished an anthology that I can recommend highly: Dark Mountain 10, “Uncivilized Poetics”.

2. The anthology contains an essay by American poet Rob Lewis called “No Nature Poems, Please”; it did indeed make me sit up and take notice.

3. Deepen your love for the earth. As Mr. Lewis says, “Nature, slowly collapsing into silence, calls out louder than ever for the poet. Now we all need what the poet brings: the broken-open hearts of words, the wild articulation, the howl.”

Jan Zwicky’s most recent collection is The Long Walk. See an excerpt from Jan’s chapbook, String Theory, in Vallum 13:2.

John Sibley Williams

1. 2016 really was an incredible year for poetry, and I’d be hard pressed to label one book (or even ten) as my favourite. But a few of my favourites have been Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Sjohnna McCray’s Rapture, Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies, and Francine J. Harris’ Play Dead.

2. Definitely Keith Leonard’s debut collection Ramshackle Ode. Somehow this powerful book hasn’t made it to any “Best of 2016” lists I’ve seen. Though it just came out earlier this year, I’ve already read it twice.

3. Instead of advice or wisdom, how about a plea? The creative, free thinking, and open-hearted aspects of American culture are under political attack by certain figures whose rowdy bases are prepared to intimidate, censor, and harm those of us who cherish diversity, those of us who choose love over discord. So I challenge every poetry lover to spend 2017 reading collections by writers outside the traditional white-male-straight hierarchy. Read Middle Eastern poets, African poets, South American poets. Read poets representing the many indigenous tribes in the US and Canada. Read émigré poets. LGBTQ poets. Activist poets. 2017 will be a pivotal year for us all, so wield your love of poetry as a weapon against those who seek to divide us.

John Sibley Williams‘ most recent collection, Disinheritance (Apprentice House Press, 2016) is “A lyrical, philosophical, and tender exploration of the various voices of grief, including those of the broken, the healing, the son-become-father, and the dead. Disinheritance acknowledges loss while celebrating the uncertainty of a world in constant revision.” See John’s poem “It Was the Golden Age of Monsters” in Vallum 13:1.

 

A huge thanks and Happy New Year to all our readers and our contributors.

And be sure to check out Poem of the Week for 52 of our favourite poems this year.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

 

Vallum 2016 Year in Poetry, Part 1

2016 was (for all its difficulties) an exciting year for poetry. This year saw the launch of Vallum: Contemporary Poetry issues 13:1 and 13:2. We were also happy to add two new chapbooks, Sonnets on a Night Without Love by Yusuf Saadi and String Practice by Jan Zwicky, to our chapbook series. And, after seven previous nominations at the National Magazine Awards, this year we celebrated a Gold Award with David McGimpsey for his poem  “The High Road.”

To help us say goodbye to the year, we asked more than 20 recent contributors to tell us what made 2016 a special year for them. We asked them:

1) What was your Favourite Poetry Book?

2) What was your Discovery of the Year? and

3) What advice do you have for 2017?

Here’s what they said:

Megan Callahan

1.  I absolutely loved Michael E. Casteels’ The Last White House At the End of the Row of White Houses, his first full-length book of poems. The collection is a wonderful blending of the strange and the ordinary, the mundane and the magical, and it was a pleasure to lose myself in Casteels’ surreal and dreamlike poetry. Each page offers a glimpse of an eerily familiar world, where robots and magic elevators are juxtaposed with bleak suburbia and office work. Funny and compelling, and imbued with empathy, Casteels’ collection definitely stood out for me this year.

2. I happened to pick up Sara Sutterlin’s I Wanted To Be the Knife at a book fair this winter, an extended edition of a booklet published in 2015. I was unfamiliar with Sutterlin’s work, and I was immediately grabbed by her awkward, erotic, and painful explorations of love and sex. Her voice is genuine, relatable, and comfortably intimate, and I couldn’t help but laugh and cringe and ache right along with her. I Wanted To Be the Knife cuts deep, and I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more of Sutterlin’s work.

3. 2016 was a difficult year, and I think many of us are looking ahead with concern and trepidation. When the future feels so unstable, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening in the day-to-day. My only advice is to live in the present as much as possible, and to fully appreciate the good times when they happen.

Megan Callahan is a freelance writer and translator from Montreal. She is currently pursuing a masters in translation studies at Concordia University, where she is researching the auditory features of French poetry. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Matrix Magazine and PRISM International, and her reviews appear regularly in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry. See Megan’s review of Laurie D. Graham’s Settler Education in Vallum 13:2.

Edward Dewar

1. My favourite poetry book is Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems. Earlier this year I was in Pages (my favourite independent book seller – they have a pretty good poetry section). Once I picked up this bilingual volume I was hooked.  Borges has since become my go-to-poet. The way his words line up on the page really digs into my subconscious.  It’s the book I pick up when I need inspiration.  Two of my favourite poems from the volume are “The Hourglass” and “The Dagger.”

2. With regards to my discovery of the year, mine is more like a re-discovery. A few years ago I purchased Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue. I read a few poems, then for whatever reason put it on the bookshelf. I was rearranging the books on the shelf when the word “Tissue” caught my eye. I picked up Charles’ book and spent the afternoon engaged with his language and imagery. It’s one of those books where I’ll partly remember a line then I have to go back and re-read the whole poem. The two poems that stand out for me in this collection are “Wrong Notes” and “Archaeology.”

Edward Dewar‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, and The Dalhousie Review. See Edward’s poem “A Scar” in Vallum 13:2.

Antony Di Nardo

1. No one book was my favourite, but I kept returning to Vijay Seshadri’s work in 3 Sections and re-read with delight Tomaz Salamun’s Woods and Chalices and The Blue Tower for the umpteenth time. I kept a Pessoa next to me for a good part of the year—Pessoa is always full of surprises no matter where or when I read him. The two new books I very much enjoyed were Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves and Matt Rader’s Desecrations. They bring an aesthetics to their poetry that I find inventive, musical, and mindful. Ashbery’s new book disappointed and I’m waiting for Seidel’s to arrive. Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry was promising, but never went far enough in exposing that hatred. It quickly ran out of margins. I preferred Tony Hoagland’s Twenty Poems That Could Save America – a collection of essays that offered fresh and creative ways to think and talk about poetry. Barry Dempster’s Disturbing the Buddha is next on my list.

2. Richard Siken. He read at the Edmonton Poetry Festival and I had just picked up his collections, Crush and War of the Foxes, which I found dazzling and compelling. Beautiful language, crushed and bruised between his fingers, his poetry an aesthetic of felt experience, obsessive, images to relish. Like all good writers do, he inspired me to respond to his work in kind, engage in conversation, so I wrote a suite of poems I entitled “Dear Richard,” talking to lyrics like “all paint is sent downstream, into the future.”

3. When you’re not writing, read. Read poetry everyday. Every single day of the year. Poems are so compact and portable – they’re on every device, on every shelf – and so rewarding with so few words. I read them for language, for words, for music, and rhythm and rhyme, for metaphors and ideas, for stories and characters and splashes of paint. And all of that usually in only one poem. A good line of poetry can so caress the eyes.

Antony Di Nardo’s poetry appears and is forthcoming in journals across Canada and internationally. He is the author of Roaming Charges (Brick Books 2015), his third collection of poetry, and is finishing work on a manuscript entitled, “Secretary of the Lawn Chair,” poems from and about village life in a global village.  See Antony’s poem “The Gardener” in Vallum 13:1.

Jim Fisher

1. SONG by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951 – 2016).

2. Hip Hop Family Tree, Vol I: 1970s – 1981, by Ed Piskor.

3. Two propositions from Baudelaire’s “Three Drafts of a Preface” for Les Fleurs du mal:
     Proposition 1. Rhythm and rhyme answer the immortal human need for monotony, symmetry, and surprise.
     Proposition 2. Poetry is related to music through prosody, whose roots go deeper into the  human soul than any classical theory indicates.

Jim Fisher is a music educator for school children in Richmond, California. See Jim’s poem “The Beast in the Garden” in Vallum 13:2.

Miki Fukuda

1. Don Domanski’s chapbook Field Notes contains a single poem and is absolutely breathtaking.  Every time I enter this poem, it makes me feel so alive, feeling and experiencing with all my senses, noticing new discoveries, within and without, because the poem itself and the language continue to renew themselves.  It is mesmerizing.

2. Discovery of the Year:  Leaves Like Spindrift by Isabel Chenot.  Her graceful lines and exquisite music make me linger and forget time.

3. I won’t offer any advice, but I find stillness to be the most important space because imagination and waking dreams can come from there.

Miki Fukuda is the author of the chapbook Finality of the Morning (Baseline Press, 2016) and the leaflet small book Songs from Twelve Moons of the Bear (Leaf Press, 2015). See Miki’s poem “Bestiary” in Vallum 13:2.

Evan J. Hoskins

1. Laurie Graham’s book Settler Education. Laurie has written about a forgotten history that just has to be told, and she’s somehow done it clearly, strikingly, and poetically. It really is a book with voice. These poems highlight speckles of various Canadian locations and histories, including the prairies and Toronto—my two homes—so it’s hard not to love it.

2. Self promotion time: The discovery of the year has been Toronto’s new and incredible arts/reading series for emerging artists, Slackline Creative Arts Series! Every month I am stunned by what people present. In all honesty, the work that Canada’s emerging artists are doing I often find to be far more interesting than that of “established” artists/authors—and I read a-lot from all levels of authors these days. The discovery of the year was that emerging poets are doing just what they should be doing: taking risks, reinventing, and pushing the craft beyond itself.

3.  The year is just a collection of days, which is a collections of hours, which is a collection of minutes, which are very easy to misplace in this busy life. Stop trying to clutch the slippery seconds and your hands will be free to type.

Evan J. Hoskins runs (with a big amazing team of co-volunteers) the Slackline Emerging Artist Series in Toronto. See Evan’s poem “Marks on the Ice” in Vallum 13:2.

Sean Howard

1. Niche, by Basma Kavanagh (Frontenac House), winner of the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. I also had the good fortune to hear her read twice from the book, and she mesmerized both audiences. An extremely serious, but seriously unpretentious, work of eco-poetry.

2. I had the chance to review (for Arc) John Terpstra’s slim masterpiece This Orchard Sound (Wolsak & Wynn, 2014): 14 exquisite sections, loosely based on the Stations of the Cross, reflecting on the making of a new cross (in Hamilton) from wood found in an abandoned, traffic-drowned orchard (in Burlington). The book, appropriately, is full of both suffering and revelation, the old, entwined testament of nature and poetry – the “testimony of apples,” the “body memory” of trees – renewed.

3. Osip Mandelstam stressed the nature of reading as an activity, itself participatory and creative. (What he called ‘passive reading’ was a terrible danger, an affront against the nature of language [and, I’d add, in the spirit of Terpstra’s work, the language of nature]). I also think listening (not just, or even mainly, to words) can and should be an activity, a mode of creative perception requiring tome-consuming cultivation.

Sean Howard’s new book is The Photographer’s Last Picture (Gaspereau Press), an experimental reflection, in poetry and prose, on twenty photographs from the Great War. See Sean’s poem “Shadowgraph 141: To Trace Out a Shallow Figure” in Vallum 13:1.

Jami Macarty

1. Favorite chapbook: Let Me Be Clear (2016)—Poems from Bernie Sanders’ filibuster speech on December 10, 2010 as (re)written by 10 incarcerated men at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility in Wilton, New York, edited by their poetry class teacher Cara Benson, and published as a Dossier by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Favourite full-length collection: The Good Dark by Annie Guthrie, Tupelo Press, 2015

2. Two new-to-me poets discovered in a friend’s book divestiture pile: Erica Jong’s Half-Lives (Henry Holt & Co, 1973) and Leslie Ullman’s Slow Work Through Sand (University Of Iowa Press, 1998).

3. Dear Citizens of 2017: Listen.

Jami Macarty‘s chapbook Landscape of the Wait, a poetic response to her nephew William’s car accident and year-long coma, is forthcoming in May/June, 2017 with Finishing Line Press. See Jami’s poem “Nor’easter” in Vallum 13:1.

Nathan Mader

1. I think my  favourite book of recent poems has to be Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016). Schiff’s tightly-wound-yet-sprawling lines accumulate endlessly surprising sonic effects and resonant images—from “A Doe Does Not Replace Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar” to “Amerithrax.” Pure incantatory force!

2. My discovery of the year was Max Ritvo and his book Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016). Sadly, this is both his debut full-length collection and his final one. Just before his book’s release, he passed away from cancer at age 25. A deeply felt knowledge of mortality haunts his poems, but don’t let your guard down: Ritvo crafts explosive inner-worlds with humour, confidence, and precision.

3. My advice is to read Gregory Scofield’s shattering Witness, I Am. For a good time call Daniel Scott Tysdal’s Fauxccasional Poems. A few other very recent ones: Michael Prior’s Model Disciple, Courtney Bates-Hardy’s House of Mystery, and Richard Kelly Kemick’s Caribou Run (and the list goes on…)

Nathan Mader has an essay forthcoming in The Literary History of Saskatchewan Vol. 3 (Coteau, 2017). See Nathan’s poem “Eilmer of Malmesbury” in Vallum 13:1.

Stuart Ian McKay

1. My favourite book this year is Jay Millar’s esp Accumulation Sonnets: So beautiful, so interesting, a book to return to over and over again.

2. I just finished reading Milton, for the second time too.  What an amazing poet!

3. My advice?  Go outside often, walk around and clear your head.  Read everything, especially the Bible, Milton, Du Fu and Kroetcsh.  Support Canadian literary journals.  Write longhand on paper.  Creativity is best when messy – enjoy writing!

Stuart Ian McKay is a Calgary poet. See his poem “An Indentation Is Also A Where” in Vallum 13:1.

Michael Prior

1. This year has seen some memorable chapbooks from poets with a full-length collection or two (or three) already on shelves, I’m thinking of Stevie Howell’s Summer, and its fierce, dialogic lyricism, as well as the labyrinthine-intelligence winding through Dani Couture’s Black Sea Nettle.This year has also been full of new talent publishing small press debuts: Curtis LeBlanc (Good for Nothing), Rebecca Salazar (Guzzle) and Michelle Brown (Foreign Experts Building) have each assembled striking chapbooks that work their poems’ emotional stakes through varied formal acumen: the results are memorable and well worth reading.

2. In particular, I wanted to draw attention to Couture’s Black Sea Nettle, with its elaborate circumlocutions (“If the relationship to one’s body is expressed / algebraically, let every variable be a decorative tuber”) and its sprawling, but deliberate accumulations of images that suggest the speakers’ unfurling worlds, both personal and public: “The waters / no longer run red or court fire.  / We’ve found better blends // to run off. Crushed pills in spoonfuls / of corn syrup. Come, the algae blooms / are so thick, we can walk on water we can’t drink”). When compared to Couture’s latest full-length collection, Yaw, Black Sea Nettle‘s poetics are sonically denser and more rhetorically complicated, marked by sudden shifts in register: Couture’s phrases echo, riff on, and torque the logic of myriad popular and academic discourses in order to evoke her speakers’ oscillating interest in “all opposing mirrors–the universe / trying to both see and collapse itself.” Black Sea Nettle is a slim volume, a scant nine poems, but all are intellectually and emotionally resonant.

3. Read more poetry; read more chapbooks!

Michael Prior‘s debut collection, Model Disciple, was released by Signal Poetry in 2016. See Michael’s poem “Godzilla Versus Mothra” in Vallum 11:1.

Yusuf Saadi

1. My favourite book that I read this year was probably The Snow Party by Derek Mahon, which was published in 1975. It has some really great poems, including the poem many consider to be his best, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.”

2.  I really enjoyed reading Kayla Czaga’s poem “Song,” from her collection For Your Safety Please Hold On. I remember reading it at about 4 am and feeling emotionally-punched; it’s so powerful. I feel that if a poet can write maybe three or four poems of that caliber in their lifetime, they have done well as a poet.

3.  I think I’m in need of advice more than I’m in any position to impart it. What I can offer are the same questions to others as I’ve been asking myself. Given that we’re living in a politically dark time, I think it’s important to ask ourselves again what role poetry has in our contemporary world. Clearly it’s not simply for the dissemination of information, as not a lot of people read poetry; I don’t think it’s merely cathartic release either. What is it then? What power does it have? What do we hope poetry can do? Answering or at least re-thinking these constellations of questions will hopefully allow us to purify our poems, and maybe ourselves.

Yusuf Saadi is the winner of Vallum’s 2016 Chapbook Contest. You can find an excerpt from Yusuf’s chapbook, Sonnets on a Night Without Love in Vallum 13:2.

James W. Wood

1. My favourite poetry book this year is Noel Duffy’s Summer Rain (Ward/Wood Publications, London, UK) – Duffy is a younger Irish poet whose reputation is flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic, with recent appearances in The Irish Times, The Financial Times, and on BBC Radio Four. His work evinces the delicate interplay between modern scientific knowledge and our human capacity for wonder and, at its best, remains in the memory long after reading, inviting us to re-read in wonder.

2. My discovery of the year was the work of the nonagenarian American Poet Stanley Moss thanks to the brilliant new English poetry journal The High Window, edited by poets David Cooke and Anthony Costello. Through decades of practice and observation, Moss has honed his craft, bringing subtlety and light to memories as varied as his service at Normandy in World War II and his life on a farm in rural New York State. Highly recommended.

3. I don’t consider myself sufficiently successful or august to dispense advice, though I now believe pleasure – the pleasure of writing, when we are fortunate enough to be afforded such pleasure, and the pleasure of reading, which ought to be obvious – to be fundamental to poetry’s future purpose and survival. I am concerned that too many poets subsume themselves in the seriousness of their craft, and focus on the development of their “career” as writers (egged on by creative writing courses, etc), without thinking of the sensual pleasure Gerard Manley Hopkins must have derived from writing, or the wit and play of the best of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc; the passion Donne brought to his verse, and so forth. Without such pleasure, there will be no readers, and poetry will be reduced to a chore or a career, instead of what it should be, which is the endlessly fresh expression of how it feels to be human, and to live.

James W. Wood is the author of five works of verse. His next book, Time Signatures, is forthcoming in 2018. Find him @James_W_Wood. See James’ essay “Perspectives on New Poetry from Britain and Ireland” in Vallum 13:2.

 

Come back tomorrow for even more thoughts on the Year in Poetry.

And be sure to check out our Poem of the Week blog for 52 of our favourite poems this year.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes.

Featured Review: “INJUN” by Jordan Abel. A review by Julie Mannell

INJUN by Jordan Abel

Review by Julie Mannell

There have been a few times where a fact was presented to me, cold and hard and entirely out of the realm of criticism, and the unbiased communication of the fact shifted the entire lens through which I view the world. Good poetry, like good theory and philosophy and mathematics are powerful in that they can destabilize the foundation of what we have forever accepted as truth. I am speaking of theories that philosophers have spent years attempting to disprove but persistently failed. It is in the failure to disprove, it is when a piece has surpassed debate, that then we must make room in our rewriting of our own stories as well as the stories of the world. This is hard. It is hard to accept something as integral to our identity as the stories we tell could also be so critically false. We have beliefs about literature; we value the narrative voices we consume and internalize them as a means to translate value from our experiences as the protagonists of our own reality. Jordan Abel’s book of poetry, Injun, destabilizes Western texts and forces us to engage in a new conversation with the literature that has been a cornerstone for writers, readers and critics for hundreds of years.

Injun is an artful exploration of the brutal colonialism that informs which voices are privileged. This privileging has orchestrated the acceptable methods, namely the way we use language, to frame both our public and personal histories. Abel employs an erasure method to Western novels, a process of cutting and repasting found texts, to probe beneath the surface of their decorative language. It is a sacrosanct retelling of these classic narratives—one that holds accountable authors through the simple representation of what was there, without argument or diatribes or magnanimous imagery. Abel violates personal beliefs—he deconstructs language that we have hoisted on a pedestal and interrogates the wide-range of racist implications such privileging connotes. Namely, through our authorization of ideologies that condone marginalization and subjugation of indigenous people.

Injun is equal parts sociological and poetic exploration of the Western Canon. In many ways it can function as a map that guides us through stories as not only they exist on the page, but as they exist as idioms that take up space and are capable of influencing people as individuals, as members of a collective culture, and as global citizens. Each page is a flat fact. The Western has played a pivotal role in the way people valorize the political acts that for centuries have preyed upon indigenous peoples. As you scroll through line after line, the way one might follow a path from one geological site to another, it is fairly obviously beyond contention that these texts are also combat zones. This was written. Large groups of people edited, published, and purchased these words. These words are hurtful and hateful and ripe with injustice. Words can be battlegrounds. A word can be a kind of war.

As these critiques emerge, and I hope there are more, I can’t help thinking about the way my own identity is being recreated. There are a few identities: me as Canadian, me as writer, me as reader, me as ethicist…they spiral. Yet so much of my own identity has been informed by myth. We create myths about literature and history so that we can excuse or applaud hedonistic efforts to disenfranchise large groups of people to take what we want but do not need. It is a disgusting method for moralizing the immoral.

I feel I am maybe doing a disservice to Abel who is a skilled poet, who crafts language the way a darner might crochet, by focusing so intensely on the broader context of his stunning work. I want to pause at lines, “money shook like rattlers” or “two yards of bright luck” and yes—Jordan Abel is an expert poet, obviously. This process of traditional critique that I would use when entering into any other work just feels so disgustingly trivial. It is trivial because the work moves beyond these conventions in poetic analysis. This isn’t a book of poetry alone. It is a documentary about the way violence forces a breakdown in language and how interpretation shatters when we speak to manifest meaningless hate. The world collapses. The words are only sounds. Injun isn’t just good; it is singular and essential.

Julie Mannell is an author of poetry, prose, and essays. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Mannell is the recipient of the Constance Rooke/HarperCollins Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, and the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing. She splits her time between Montreal and Toronto.

To view other reviews and content published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is also available in digital format. Featuring additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!

Download the FREE APP and FREE SAMPLE EDITION for your tablet, kindle or smartphone through PocketMags OR iTunes

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Featured Interview: Jennifer Still

 

Ordinary Magic, An Interview With Jennifer Still

By Sharon Caseburg

Sharon Caseburg: Do you believe in magic?

Jennifer Still: Yes! Let’s just say it’s within my sense of the “possible” to
be awestruck quite regularly!

SC: How do you define “magic”?

JS: I think of magic as any form of surprising connection. It’s that resonant,
sparking encounter which seems to be the result of some heightened state
of openness. It is what happens when I am most engaged, alert, or play-
fully attentive. It is that sense of the world becoming something more, or,
to borrow a term from Alice in Wonderland, “curiouser and curiouser.”

SC: How does poetry operate within this definition? What’s so magical
about it?

JS: I think the magic in poetry, in any art form really, is in its making. The
open state I mention above is the space where poetry becomes possible.
I think of poetry as linguistic divination—a two-way bending of meaning
and words. So the poet wanders out, dowsing for the poem that is both
a leaning towards and a drawing up. A following and an attracting. The
magic is in finding this pose, the most intense arc between the words and
the current of meaning by which they are drawn.

This past summer I spent a lot of time at our cabin near Lake Winnipeg.
One day as I was swimming I found myself recalling one of the first poems
I had written many years before, and remembering quite specifically a sin-
gle line from that poem as if I were just beginning to understand, all these
years later, what it was working toward. The poem was called “Swimming
Lessons” and the line was “fresh from chrysalis.” As I swam with this line
in my mind a flutter caught my eye. A pale pink, palm-sized moth flapped
on the water’s surface, drowning likely, quite far from the shore. I caught
it in my hands and carried it back, placing it on my notebook to dry. As I
carried it, I had this feeling that I had encountered my poem, right there in
the lake, saved it in fact, momentarily, from being washed away. The moth,
that I later learned to be an oakworm, eventually died on the page as I
thought the poem I’d written years before had. But the poem comes back.
I’m trying now for the words around this encounter. To cast out towards
the poem as the moth’s ripple on the water cast out to me. It is moments
like this—when the imaginative and the material converge—that I consi-
der charmed. That sense of recognition where the world and my place in it
becomes more poignant and strange.

SC: Do you find when you are in the “zone,” working on a particular piece,
that you are more open to these types of “charmed” experiences, than say
in the regular day to day?

JS: Oh for sure. It can be overwhelming actually, the connections that
present themselves. When I’m really focused on my writing, my poem will
begin to speak to me through odd and wondrous ways. If I’m interested in
prescribed forest burning say, I will learn in the planting of a tree that the
uppermost roots on a sapling are called a “flare.” Later, my son will insist
on lighting birthday candles and snuffing them out with a brass bell. I will
become hyper-sensitive to the scent of smoke, from burnt electrical wires
to a cigar lit across a park. A dental procedure will involve the melted sap
of a tree. Language, image, and associations will begin to present them-
selves all around me and it will be as if I am living inside my poem, as if it
has chosen me and now I must listen and write my way out!

SC: You believe in the transformative nature of poetry. In which ways do
these transformative properties of poetry work?

JS: The transformative nature of poetry for me is in its seemingly bound-
less potential to say something new through a medium that on one level is
as accessible, utilitarian and as ordinary as our thumbs! It’s astounding to
me that the same material that comprises a grocery list and game board
rules can be twisted into a poem! It is in language’s flexibility—the sticky
web of poetry’s footings—that words transform.

For instance, if we try to isolate a word as sound, purely, or rhythm, we
still can’t quite separate it from its meaning, or association within us.
Words are filled with so many threads of their own, they are webs unto
themselves. Place one word beside another and poof, we have meaning!
Neruda’s hat of night flying full of holes offers up a new idea of the stars—
what is perceived to be in multiples could perhaps be one blinding light. So
metaphor becomes a kind of alchemy. A particle is smashed and recon-
figured. Our perception is transformed. The poem is not the words unto
themselves, but the elixir of their combined presence.

Much resides in a poem’s betwixt location, that significant stretch be-
tween language as we know it and everything we haven’t said, what we
may understand at some level but hold away from ourselves, just outside
of words. It is when we encounter language for our speechlessness that we
transform our thinking and ways of experiencing the world.

SC: Are you superstitious?

JS: Just a bit (knock on wood).

SC: Are there any particular charms or talismans you hold dear?

JS: There are two parts to this for me. The first is the conceptual charm:
the charm of words and the images I’ve tied to them. As I create through
language I am trying to make words more tangible, to hear through them
the way one would with a shell held to the ear, listening for the larger con-
text from which they are a part. And so it is that the most concrete charac-
ter form of a word, its smallest, hardest, seed-like state, that has become,
increasingly, a touchstone for me.

However, I’m also very fond of objects. This is the second part for me.
There’s always a question for me whether or not I’m writing a poem or
creating an object, something meant to exist more spherical than textual.
I always have an extreme object version of my poems in mind when I’m
working on them. I like to imagine what my poem would look like if I could
lift it off the page and hold it in my hands. I am interested in the poem with-
out words, if that makes any sense. What is its elemental form? Which
of course isn’t anything likely to simply be found. To think of the poem as
charm, as a physical shape helps me to see what I’m creating. As a result,
in writing, I often encounter objects that seem to have fallen right out of
my poems.

SC: Has any particular object or talisman sparked the creation of a poem?

JS: Very clearly, yes, many and actually all my projects have a central
material-world figure. A central image is very useful to me in locating my
writing. If something tangible, say, as a hummingbird sits at the center of
large conceptual ideas such as “beauty” or “capture” or “being seen,” then
I have a counterweight to anchor the line as I cast out for the poem. Even
if the bird flits away, the pendant center of the poem is clear to me, the
bronze cast around which the words were formed remains suspended on
some level.

Right now the image of a rose bowl is at the center of my next work. You
know, those glass water bowls from the fifties that preserved flowers? I’m
fascinated by the concept of “eternal bloom” or what was meant to be!
My great-grandmother had one that I spent many hours gazing into like a
crystal ball, as if the rose blossom was the dress of a dancer that might be
caught in there. I haven’t held one for years but I can still sense the weight
and gloss of it.

SC: Do the transformative or magical properties of poetry change when
poetry is spoken or read out loud?

JS: They can—for better or for worse, I think. Reading one’s poetry to an
audience is an opportunity for the poem to live anew really. It’s a chance
to enter that open field yet again with the work! Mostly I am interested in
chance, improvisation, spontaneity, and how this intimate, lived, embo-
died version of the work can recast the poem, both for the reader and for
the audience.

With my last book I felt it necessary to recite a sequence of poems I call
“Tracks” because they were far more alive under my skin than they were
on the page. They were composed more as chant, written with speed and
rhythm and not necessarily for the page at all. It’s funny, but every time I
recite one of these pieces my nerves momentarily dissolve. The reading
is not about me suddenly. I am not this fraud-feeling poet looking embar-
rassingly down at a page in public. Instead, I am completely untethered
from the book. I am back in that place between heart and poem I guess. I
am the poem, for those 90 seconds, perhaps in the same way a musician
might become her song. I never have post-reading remorse after a recita-
tion the way I often do after a straight-ahead reading.

SC: How does the incantation of poetry affect you?

JS: Incantatory work calls for a listening, a spine of presence, that is far
more visceral than it is intellectual. The rhythms of the incantatory or
recited poem are as important as the words. It is a form that lives more
in the air, in its act or ritual, than on the page. It is more intimate and
internal than a poem simply read. In incantation, the page is stripped away.
The poem is immediate, imperative, on a level more akin to original com-
position than refined document. The heaviness of song in incantation is
more rhythm than lyric. The poet more conjurer than orator. A secret text
is evoked.

Perhaps it is this secret text we are holding out for, what we believe words
might contain for us, that gives poetry its magic: this potential to be turned
toward something new, to reveal ourselves back to ourselves, to be spelled
out to our desires.

1 Neruda, Pablo, The Book of Questions, trans. William O’Daly, Copper-Canyon Press, 2nd edition, 2001.

 

Jennifer Still is the recipient of the 2012 John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Her second collection of poems, Girlwood (Brick Books, 2011), was nominated for the 2012 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. A faculty member of the 2013 Banff Centre of the Arts Wired Writing Studio and a poetry editor for the literary journal CV2, Jennifer lives within hopeful proximity of Philip’s Magical Paradise, the only magic museum in Western Canada.

This interview is featured in 10:1 “Magic”. To view other work published in this issue please visit Vallum’s website.

Vallum magazine is available as a digital feature with additional content such as: AUDIO and VIDEO recordings of selected poets, further poems, interviews, essays, and MORE!