small, unnecessary devotions

So what are we left with? Perhaps nothing more than the realization that much of life is devoted to things that in the end don’t matter very much, except to us. Time passes whether we like it or not, and its too-quick progress is measured out in private longings and solitary trivialities as much as in choices we might defend to a skeptical audience. This isn't to say there aren't reasons for us to love the things we love - Robert Frost was wrong, or at least not entirely right, to say that we "love the things we love for what they are." But those reasons can be difficult to describe in the way that it's hard to describe what red looks like, or how one's relationship with a child or parent feels. The same is true of poetry. I can’t tell you why you should bother to read poems, or to write them; I can only say that if you do choose to give your attention to poetry, as against all the other things you might turn to instead, that choice can be meaningful. There’s little grandeur in this, maybe, but out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.

- David Orr, in the chapter entitled "Why Bother?" in his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

#whitepoetproblems

[Robert Duncan's] biological mother died in childbirth. He was adopted into a family of Theosophists. His adoptive parents were part of a hermetic brotherhood in Oakland, California... [They] adopted Duncan based on his astrological chart, and they told him that they had adopted him because of his “bad karma”...

Duncan had a troubled relationship with [his mother]. There are a couple things here: he was homosexual... she didn’t seem to have trouble with that so much. And it may actually have been part of the prediction, based on his astrological chart, that he would be “deviant” in this way. The chart also, according to his parents, showed that he had had his last incarnation in Atlantis, and that he had been part of a generation that had destroyed their own world, and that he had been brought back for the end times, now, which would be some fiery ending, probably atomic... That was in his head, growing up. But I don’t think that bothered him as much as the fact that she wanted him to be an architect.

- Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan's biographer, in interview with Curtis Fox for Poetry Off the Shelf, proving that even the crazies wish their kids would stop writing poetry and get real jobs. You can listen to the whole thing here.

welcomes and confounds

When a nonspecialist audience is responding well to a poem, its reaction is a kind of tentative pleasure, a puzzled interest that resembles the affection a traveler bears for a destination that both welcomes and confounds him. For such readers, then, it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.

- David Orr, in the introduction to his book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

"the other side of ourselves" interview

In early December I got a note from Lena Garabedian, a student at the University of Toronto, who was writing a review of The Other Side of Ourselves for a course, and had a few questions for me.

Her questions were thoughtful, and worked their way a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of the book, and some of its specific poems, than other Q+As I've done for the book to date. So, with Lena's permission, I've posted her questions and my replies below. If you've read TOSOO, I hope you find this interesting.

Thanks, Lena, for taking the time with my book!

Lena Garabedian: The Other Side of Ourselves is the first book which has been your full debut to the poetry world. In doing so, was there any specific reasons why you placed “The Wailing Machines,” as your opening poem for your first book? Do you think that this was a good representation of what the rest of the book had to offer?

Rob Taylor: I'm glad you picked up on this poem in terms of sequencing. My manuscript existed for a year and a half before I sent it to a publisher. Over that time, I rearranged the sequence of the poems many, many times, but "The Wailing Machines" was always the first poem. In fact, for a long while, it was the title of the manuscript (it was the title listed for the manuscript when it won the Alfred G. Bailey prize, for instance) - I only changed it after the book was accepted by Cormorant. Once it was accepted, my editor, the wonderful Montreal poet Robyn Sarah, overhauled the sequencing once more, altering it almost completely (on this note, if you ever want to gain insight into one approach to organizing the poems in a poetry collection, I recommend you pick up Robyn's book Little Eurekas, which feature an excellent essay on book sequencing). One of the few elements that stayed the same was that "The Wailing Machines" was up front. In other words, the poem wasn't chosen to open the book haphazardly (unlike, say, David McFadden's recent books, which were sequenced randomly).

As for "why", there are a few answers:

1. It is one of the better poems in the book, in my opinion, and I like the idea of starting strong.

2. It is, as you say, representative of a number of the poems in the book in a few ways: its length, its more-or-less plainspokenness, its very slight nod to more formal poetry without being "formal" (it is 14 lines, like a sonnet, and has a turn in it, at the 11th line - a nod to the sonnet's volta), and its search for a natural spoken rhythm (something I'm always chasing but rarely catch).

3. Most importantly, it is a poem about meeting, about coming together (granted, rather violently in this case). It's a poem about the start of something - the start of everything, in a sense. As a writer I very much want readers to know that I am interested in them, in their presence and participation in the book. I want too be generous and welcoming, so it only seemed right to have a "welcoming" poem up front.

LG: In reading “You Can’t Lead a Horse” the second time around, I noticed the line, “The woman is drunk. She asks the water for waiter”. Was this a publication error or was it done purposely to be read in this way?

RT: That was on purpose. The error was the woman's, not mine or my publisher's! It's tricky to write a poem in which every couplet ends with the same word (a quasi-ghazal, keeping with my "almost formal" style I mentioned above) and not have it be hopelessly monotonous. While not the main reason that couplet was included in the poem, it did serve as a way to break up the monotony of the couplet endings while still, in a sense, maintaining the form.


LG: In your book, I saw a fluid concept of nature throughout many of your poems: “You Can’t Lead a Horse”, “Early Rain”, and “Errant”. These poems had many examples of elements of nature. Is this the result of your natural surroundings in beautiful British Columbia? Does geography have any impact on your writing?

RT: Yes, it is (and yes, geography does). Much has been made about Canadian poets being obsessed with writing about nature, as though it is somehow our national duty. One of the main reasons I address the Canadian landscape as much as I do (and a reason that rarely gets mentioned in the discussions I read on this subject) is because I do much of my writing while in quiet settings away from home. My wife and I go away on at least one, and often two or three, hiking trips each summer - usually along the BC coast, on Vancouver Island, or in the Rockies (for instance, "You Can't Lead a Horse" and "Early Rain" were written on the same day during a hike at Berg Lake in the Rockies). We also go to friends' cabins two or three times a year (I'm actually writing this response to you from one right now, just south of Whistler, surrounded by 100 ft pines and year's first snowfall).

We would travel to these places whether I wrote on the trips or not, but we go as frequently as we do in part because I get so much work done. I find it very difficult to write in the city, with its noise and people and constant buzzing - in many ways "Errant" is an attempt on my part to address those stresses. That many of the poems I write on these trips are about nature is largely a product of the type of poet I am - I look out the window, I listen, I consider the day I'm leading (where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going), and I do my best to make a poem from what I find.


LG: What kind of work are you most drawn to reading? Do you find yourself reading work similar to your own, or completely different?

RT: Both, though I often swing back and forth in bunches. I'll go for a while reading whatever I am most drawn to, not thinking about my choices too much, until I've built up a backlog of books that I am less intrinsically drawn to, for whatever reason. At some point, I'll switch over and dig into the pile that I had some early resistance to. I usually push myself to do this by telling myself that it's important for rounding myself out as a reader, and that even if I dislike the books, I can still learn a lot from them that will help inform my own writing. Often enough, once I get reading I find I like these books as much, or more, than the books I came to easily. A couple examples of "happy surprises" this year would be Matthew Zapruder's "Come On All You Ghosts" and Garry Thomas Morse's "Discovery Passages".


LG: What was your motivation in writing “On Realizing Everyone Has Written Some Bad Poems”, a play on Al Purdy’s poem, “On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems”? Why did you choose that specific poem and/or poet and not another one?

RT: A couple years ago, Jean Baird started a fundraising drive to save Al and Eurithe Purdy's old A-frame house in Amelisaburgh, Ontario. I was a fan of Purdy's writing, and volunteered to help raise funds, giving readings of Al Purdy's poems here and there around Vancouver to drum up interest. At some point around then, possibly in reading Paul Vermeersch's "The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology", I learned about Purdy's hatred of his first book, The Enchanted Echo (which, according to Steven Heighton, he once called "a piece of goddamn shit"). As a struggling young poet myself, loaded with insecurity and about the same age as Purdy was when he published The Enchanted Echo, I felt a connection with this time in Purdy's life. The poem came out of that, with the title following naturally enough after the subject matter.

raoul fernandes @ spoken ink

The next instalment of the Burnaby Writers' Society's "Spoken Ink" series is this Tuesday, and will feature friend-of-silaron and black belt poetry ninja Raoul Fernandes.

The details:

Spoken Ink
Tuesday, January 17th, 8:00 PM (7:30 Open Mic Signup)
La Fontana Cafe
101-3701 East Hastings (at Boundary), Burnaby
Featuring: Raoul Fernandes
Free!

So long as my never-ending flu calms down a bit, I'll be there. I hope to see you there (and I promise not to cough in your direction)!

last chance to hibernate

Because January 15th is a Sunday, the deadline for Pandora's Colletive's "Hibernating with Words" contest has been extended to January 16th. All you need to do is to get your submission to the post office and stamped by the end of day Monday.

(click on the image to expand)

The full contest details are available here.  Good luck!

dead poets report

Our second Dead Poets Reading Series event happened last Sunday. Project Space was packed to the point that I had to stand in a neigbouring room and lean my head in to see anything (hence the lack of close-up pictures - you can see all the pictures I did manage here).

We were caught a bit by surprise by the attendance, which was up from November. It seems the formidable power of the CBC was at work, as an interview with Christopher Levenson and myself about the series had aired on North by Northwest that morning (at some point between 6 and 9 AM - needless to say, I didn't hear it myself), and a number of people mentioned having come out because they heard about it on NXNW. I haven't been able to track down the audio of the interview yet, but if I find it anywhere I'll link it here. Thanks so much to Sheryl MacKay for taking the time (and airtime) to chat with us a bit.

The readings were all quite wonderful, each in its own particular, quirky way. Heidi Greco has a great recap of them here.

Our next event will be on March 11th, and will be the Vancouver leg of the cross-country Irving Layton Centenary celebrations. We are still looking for a few readers for that. You can read more information on how to get involved on the DPRS website.

Thanks to everyone who came out, especially our readers!

From L to R: Garry Thomas Morse (Jack Spicer), Miranda Pearson (Stevie Smith), Diane Tucker (Christina Rossetti), David Zieroth (Thomas Hardy), John Donlan (Edward Thomas)

shocks me out of the minutia

Chad Pelley: Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Jacob McArthur Mooney: Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives. There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

- Jacob McArthur Mooney, in interview with Chad Pelley for Salty Ink. The interview also includes the line, "Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness." So read it here already, ok?

leaving itself absolutely nowhere to hide

Frost treats the mechanism of poetic composition as a tool of philosophical concision, and that as long as we are using speech, and not algebra and mathematics, its beauty and clarity of expression are not strictly separate from its truth-value. Style also carries information. Here he conflates two conceits, a lyric one and a Pre-Socratic one. The first is the article of faith that beauty is truth, and that whatever aspires to the condition of song is also pursuing a parallel vector of truthful statement. And the second is that if something can be cleanly and concisely expressed, simplified to the aphoristic, to the demotic, to the plain-speaking, it has a better chance of being true than something which can’t, simply by its insistence on omitting the extraneous, emphasising the communicative foundation of language, and, maybe most importantly, leaving itself absolutely nowhere to hide.

Frost goes on challenging us not to deal with his poetry, but with what it proposes. A poem is not primarily written to provide an excuse to have a conversation about poetry, but as an emotional and intellectual provocation to which we are challenged to respond in kind.

- Don Paterson, closing his lecture on Robert Frost's poetry entitled "Frost as a Thinker" at the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. You can listen to the whole thing here.

the barrier between myself and the world

People never pray just once. They pray often, sometimes multiple times a day, for it is prayer which creates a connection to something larger than themselves, restoring a sense of calm and inner equilibrium, and thus helps them to live their lives.

Writing poetry and reading poetry does something similar for me. Each helps me to live by breaking down the barriers that exist between myself and the world at large, and in the process, real or imagined, my life is made whole.

- Chris Banks, in his one answer to Alex Boyd's One Question Interview on his BoydBlog. You can read the whole thing here.