tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-229665232024-03-18T07:43:19.682-07:00Roll of NickelsCanadian Poetry + Shameless Self-Promotion Since 2006Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.comBlogger1620125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-2926813003753065672024-03-16T13:43:00.003-07:002024-03-16T13:43:58.471-07:00to balance an algebra not meant to be solved<p></p><blockquote>When we absorb images, dance or music from a culture outside our own, we may project substantial misinterpretations, but it is also possible to receive the sense of what was intended: a face, a fright, an ode. A written poem in a foreign language is inscrutable. Someone has to ferry it across the difference... To translate a poem faithfully is to balance an algebra not made to be solved; a task for which it does not hurt to invoke the primordial spirits.</blockquote><p>- Sadiqa de Meijer, from the essay "stilte/silence"<i> </i>in her essay collection <i>alfabet/alphabet.</i> </p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-9223856688234667972024-01-29T09:00:00.001-08:002024-01-29T09:00:00.131-08:00poems do more than soothe or teach<p></p><blockquote><p>We take poetry too seriously. This occurred to me as I reviewed the magazines my publisher, Biblioasis, sent to me in hefty boxes. When I first took up the form in the mid to late aughts, surrealism and irony were in. The hot new poets rarely said what they meant or meant what they said. They mixed Latinate and vernacular diction and wore the skinniest jeans I’d ever seen. For all their ingenious descriptions of the globalized, technological moment, these poets’ perspective seemed removed from the world, not transcendent but aloof. At worst, their poems were trifling, with little feeling or gravity. Where was the beating heart?</p><p>Then history took a turn: asylum seekers’ bodies strewn along European shores, Trump’s chintzy demagoguery, pandemic lockdowns and mass graves, neo-Nazi marches, police violence, historic wildfires, the air thick with ash. As daily life grew more surreal, the dominant voice in poetry became more direct and serious, more rooted in real individual experience. A new generation of literary gatekeepers emerged to facilitate this shift. A number of the magazines I read for this anthology opened with an editor’s note that solemnly reflected on the need to heal, both from the terrors of the recent past and from the legacy of genocide and slavery upon which the so‑called New World was built.</p><p>When this trend first emerged, I was excited to see so many poets write candidly and with real political rage about our denial of the past and the untenability of the status quo, often with the same technical adventurousness that drew me to poetry in the first place. At some point over the last decade, however, the content superseded the form. Canadian poets and magazine editors have confused good poetry with good politics. Many poems in journals today consist primarily of solipsistic observations, social justice tropes, and moralizing narratives delivered in a uniform first-person voice. They are wooden and boring. What’s worse, poets cheapen political subject matter when they treat it with formal laziness or as a platform to signal their virtue.</p><p>I don’t believe poetry has gotten worse. Great poems continue to be written and published, as I hope the anthology demonstrates. However, the editorial curation now skews heavily in favour of poetry with a social justice message, regardless of how (or how well) it’s written. This orthodoxy is stifling. I read hundreds of magazines in the course of a year, and sometimes it seemed like every other poem was about trauma or the politics of personal identity. Some of these were excellent, but many were indistinguishable fluff.</p><p>Poetry may be therapeutic, but it is not therapy. Poetry may be enlightening, but it is not pedagogy. The best poems do more than soothe or teach. They enter and alter our consciousness such that our perception of everything else is filtered through them.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>- <a href="https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2024/01/line-by-line/">Bardia Sinaee</a>, from his essay on editing <i>Best Canadian Poetry 2024, </i>"Line by Line." You can read the whole thing <a href="https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2024/01/line-by-line/">here</a>.</p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-2746727767965129142024-01-22T09:00:00.000-08:002024-01-22T09:00:00.248-08:00we took the desert's role for granted<p></p><p> </p><blockquote>Those downtown institutions - the Sam the Record Man and HMV - are gone now, of course. Vintage Video was uprooted by developers. It doesn't seem to have taken in its new location, which Google Earth reveals is now a Wine Rack. </blockquote><blockquote>Perhaps Netflix and other streaming services are sending young twenty-first-century minds rafting down tributaries of their own... But speed of scrolling, algorithmic assistance, and instant access weren't what my friends and I needed, even if we might've welcomed them as conveniences. We needed that long subway trip downtown. (We were the farthest stop west.) We needed the sobering disappointments and sporadic victories. We needed the longueurs that new technology seeks to close, as if abolishing boredom ever does anyone a favour. Mostly, we needed wind resistance. It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it's clear now that we took the desert's role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you've toiled for it. </blockquote><p>- Jason Guriel on acquiring physical media in the pre-internet age, from his book <i><a href="https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/on-browsing/">On Browsing</a>.</i></p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-65607458938064558552024-01-15T09:00:00.001-08:002024-01-15T09:00:00.423-08:00in the absence of style a poem is hamstrung<p></p><blockquote>... precision and technique are paramount. Without them a genuine style cannot be achieved, and no matter how clever the conceit, how deeply felt the emotion, in the absence of style a poem is hamstrung, its race brought to a premature halt. I can imagine several ways to measure the success of a poem or collection. As a common reader, I ask whether I want to read a poem or book again, while as a critic I ask whether I am compelled to write about the works in question. Poets, I suspect, ask whether there is anything to be learned, imitated, or, as T.S. Eliot had it, stolen. But the true test of style is more visceral. Does the poem prompt its reader, arrested yet suddenly moved, to abandon the book and take a breathless lap around the room?</blockquote><p>- Nicholas Bradley, reviewing his selection criteria in picking the books in his omnibus review selected from Canadian poetry titles published in 2021, in <a href="https://www.utpjournals.press/toc/utq/92/3">the "Letters in Canada 2021" issue of </a><i><a href="https://www.utpjournals.press/toc/utq/92/3">University of Toronto Quarterly</a>.</i></p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-3241754605046034432024-01-02T09:00:00.001-08:002024-01-02T09:00:00.141-08:00the 2023 roll of nickels year in review<p>2023 saw the addition of more of my favourite things here on the blog: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/interview">eight new interviews</a> and thirteen new <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/quote">quotes on writing</a>. Those eight interviews put me over one hundred total! And more will be coming your way soon, including interviews with Gillian Sze and Sue Sinclair in the next issues of <i>The Antigonish Review</i> and<i> ARC Poetry Magazine</i>, respectively. And my <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">Read Local BC Poetry Month series</a> will be back for its fifth year. </p><p></p><div>Far more important than any of that, in 2023 the Malahat Review Listserv experienced a <i>second </i>"unsubscribe" meltdown down (you can read my summary of the 2014 meltdown <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-perfect-storm.html">here</a>). This time round, I opened up the opportunity to publish found poems drawn from the dozens of "unsubscribe" requests to all Listserv members, and poems poured in from <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/06/this-makes-me-nervous.html">Rhonda Ganz</a>, <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/06/malahat-review-listserv-found-poem-2.html">Patrick Grace</a>, <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/06/malahat-review-listserv-found-poem-6.html">Penn Kemp</a> and more (you can read them all <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>).<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVnxGMb1m8VlIA1Bi3LvsuJ6W509ykebi0Bc4IHMCos0uWfNBvPTFf6oyb8iYU6tXedmpNSB2PsDozVna2Oxi7sPkBp4x3yrQPePze7faRcT0DRviodcpoivcdW9hmN-t6QkHRjRbfFvdSEkNQoydtoBcdIzqrXXcBuBaD5ejKZgo261Q3s5Q_" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="840" data-original-width="1024" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhVnxGMb1m8VlIA1Bi3LvsuJ6W509ykebi0Bc4IHMCos0uWfNBvPTFf6oyb8iYU6tXedmpNSB2PsDozVna2Oxi7sPkBp4x3yrQPePze7faRcT0DRviodcpoivcdW9hmN-t6QkHRjRbfFvdSEkNQoydtoBcdIzqrXXcBuBaD5ejKZgo261Q3s5Q_=w320-h262" title="Some of my favourite reads of 2023" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of my favourite reads of 2023</td></tr></tbody></table>On a personal level, 2024 was a very busy year, which largely explains the sparse posting! In addition to writing and teaching, I served as <a href="https://blogs.ufv.ca/blog/2023/02/writer-in-residence-rob-taylor-on/">Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley</a> in the winter, and then returned to campus to coordinate the <a href="http://fvwritersfestival.com/">Fraser Valley Writers Festival</a> in the Fall. I also wrapped up edits on my next book, <i><a href="http://roblucastaylor.com/weather/">Weather</a></i>, a companion piece to my 2016 collection <i><a href="http://roblucastaylor.com/the-news/">The News</a></i>, which will be published this Spring from Gaspereau Press.<br /><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on">Enough preamble! On to my review of my favourite posts of the year:<br /><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on"><span style="font-size: large;">July 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/07/on-display-in-my-mind-interview-with.html">On Display in My Mind: An Interview with Nick Thran</a></span><br /><blockquote>"I don’t see the engagement with other art forms in my poems as an interest, really. It’s just my life. Maybe it has to do with trying to rid oneself of the ego, of the preciousness that can sometimes accompany one’s identity as it relates to a singular art form. I think it’s important to think about the metaphor of an artistic diversity, like a biodiversity, as something that has the potential to save and sustain life. It never has made sense to me why anyone would impose a hierarchy of value upon, or a border between, an episode of Succession, an album by Frank Ocean, a quilt by Anna Torma, and a poem by Sarah Holland-Batt. And it has never made sense to me why I wouldn’t write about the ways any other person or group’s work has burrowed itself into my own consciousness, into my own point of view and practice. " - Nick Thran</blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-size: large;">November 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/11/listening-for-my-breath-interview-with.html">Listening For My Breath: An Interview with Délani Valin</a></span><br /><blockquote>"I’ve long had the sense that being Métis isn’t a checkbox we tick off, nor does it end with the knowledge of Métis ancestry. Being Métis is an ongoing process: a way of seeing, being, knowing and connecting. Being in relation with other Métis people helped me see this, and made me realize the validity of my own experience. It echoed the experiences of others, and was in some places distinct." - Délani Valin </blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-size: large;">November 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-poems-hum-interview-with-roger-farr.html">The Poem's Hum: An Interview with Roger Farr</a></span><br /><blockquote>"At times I imagined what I was doing as a kind of psychoanalysis—deciphering exquisitely complicated “defense mechanisms” designed to throw me off the case. But the realization that I would never “get it right” was very liberating. I let go of any desire to “master” poetic language a long time ago, and instead learned to enjoy the free play and signification of words. It’s something I notice a lot of my writing students struggle with. For me, difficulty and complexity are an invitation into collaboration and creative problem solving. As a writer I thrive there." - Roger Farr</blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-size: large;">November 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/11/uncooperative-with-unexpected-interview.html">Uncooperative with the Expected: An Interview with Dale Tracy</a></span><br /><blockquote>"Outside of poetry, I worry a lot about misunderstandings and about misrepresenting myself. But communicating with poetry circumvents those worries. There’s always more meaning in art than any one person can arrive at, so I have no impulse for readers that would get in their minds exactly what I have in mine. " - Dale Tracy</blockquote><div> </div><span style="font-size: large;">December 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/12/choosing-not-to-cry-interview-with-jane.html">Choosing Not To Cry: An Interview with Jane Munro</a></span><br /><blockquote>"There is a draining of the body when a lover goes and will not be replaced. I am hugely grateful for the fullness of life I have been given. But now solitude is to my soul what food is to my body. I feel a profound need, and gratitude, for the solitude that has come lately into my life, giving me time and space to write." - Jane Munro</blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-size: large;">December 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/12/close-to-barbed-wire-interview-with.html">Close to the Barbed Wire: An Interview with Tāriq Malik</a></span><br /><blockquote>"It was a struggle pinning the words to the pages. Often, all I wanted to do was violently break open the language to express my own rage." - Tāriq Malik</blockquote><p> </p><span style="font-size: large;">December 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-little-clearer-and-cleaner-interview.html">A Little Clearer and Cleaner: An Interview with David Zieroth</a></span><br /><blockquote>"write to find what the initial idea or inspiration wants me to find, and I feel this process not only creates action on the page but also is the most exhilarating and exciting in my life, and also the healthiest. " - David Zieroth</blockquote><br /><span style="font-size: large;">December 2023: <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2023/12/learning-second-language-when-it-should.html">Learning a Second Language When It Should Be My First: An Interview with Wanda John-Kehewin</a></span><br /><blockquote>"I wanted to use poetic elements like tone, diction, syntax, meter, form, etc. to weave my way through discovery and what it felt like to write in another language which wasn’t my own, but which was the only language I spoke. It felt foreign and still feels foreign to try to sound out Cree words, like I am trying to learn a second language when it should be my first. " - Wanda John-Kehewin</blockquote><br /></div><div dir="ltr" trbidi="on">Happy New Year, all!</div></div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-68020578040212162432023-12-26T09:00:00.088-08:002023-12-26T09:00:00.142-08:00Learning a Second Language When It Should Be My First: An Interview with Wanda John-Kehewin<p><i>T</i><em>he following interview is part seven of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>ᐁᒋᑫ ᐃᐧᔭᓯᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ</b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><br /></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓄᐦᑯᒼ went to residential school</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᒧᓲᒼ went to war</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᐊᐧᐦᑯᒪᑲᐣ hung himself</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓂᑲᐃᐧᐢ shot herself</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓂᑲᐃᐧᕀ drank herself gone</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓅᐦᒑᐄᐧᐢ died with a bottle</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓄᐦᑕᐃᐧᕀ didn’t want to die</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓂᑐᑌᒼ lost to the streets</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓂᑐᑌᒼ finally passed away</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᐊᐋᐧᓯᐢ lost to the system</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᓂᔭ witness and survivor</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">ᐋᒋᒧᐢᑕᐁᐧ</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="color: #0000ee; font-size: x-small;"><i><u><a href="https://talonbooks.com/books/spells-wishes-and-the-talking-dead">Spells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân</a></u></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Talonbooks, 2023)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1hJrP4Y_RWFR1To7nwigzeHNFaA_QigYNSGXmoXnPZBz6LoYHpkoh1PQ3zznt9pd7sAYlZqt__lyd2pDDfYCz2lZ_CAgD-HQ2wrQoOu1TuwZCYmvQ0JWNvVKRi-Xkc0lBqo91HpJ_16-pedZQZJidY0nONcQHtH0wMtFyMMk4OoGuqpIKH3Pg/s1200/Wanda-John-Kehewin-blog-banner.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1hJrP4Y_RWFR1To7nwigzeHNFaA_QigYNSGXmoXnPZBz6LoYHpkoh1PQ3zznt9pd7sAYlZqt__lyd2pDDfYCz2lZ_CAgD-HQ2wrQoOu1TuwZCYmvQ0JWNvVKRi-Xkc0lBqo91HpJ_16-pedZQZJidY0nONcQHtH0wMtFyMMk4OoGuqpIKH3Pg/w400-h210/Wanda-John-Kehewin-blog-banner.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div><br /><div><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> The title and section titles of your new book, <i><a href="https://talonbooks.com/books/spells-wishes-and-the-talking-dead">Spells, Wishes, and the Talking Dead ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ ᐸᑯᓭᔨᒧᐤ ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ mamahtâwisiwin, pakosêyimow, nikihci-âniskotâpân</a></i>, are all presented in three ways: in English, in Cree syllabics (ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ), and in romanized Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin). Though the majority of the words in these poems are in English, occasional words are presented in Cree instead of English, with a ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ nêhiyawêwin glossary at the back for English speakers. Why did you make that choice, and what effect do you hope for it to have on your readers? </div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk8hhRWUrIdvApTZc6wFhRjNtdACOXI4CnFPljORGvZuWykHs3Kqn_JUrWXuEOoChEjTGCV_mF8rHp24R9qit-VP6iNbbifOVpYmmCf2ynKe8tETZ_RSXw6WiO6r289kG1-uDwDkSTP9w4b14_QLX2KcL8W-LvxDYG3c1Tb3u5ttjHorf8YzQo/s1200/Spells.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk8hhRWUrIdvApTZc6wFhRjNtdACOXI4CnFPljORGvZuWykHs3Kqn_JUrWXuEOoChEjTGCV_mF8rHp24R9qit-VP6iNbbifOVpYmmCf2ynKe8tETZ_RSXw6WiO6r289kG1-uDwDkSTP9w4b14_QLX2KcL8W-LvxDYG3c1Tb3u5ttjHorf8YzQo/s320/Spells.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>Wanda John-Kehewin:</b> I made this choice to sort of decolonize language and as a way to “take it back.” Since the very first book I wrote, <i>In the Dog House</i> (Talonbooks, 2013), I’ve had this unsettling feeling that’s sat with me throughout my time as a writer who publishes things. I’ve really tried to figure it out. I finally realized that the unsettled feeling I had was that I was a fraud as a Cree poet because I didn’t write or speak my own language which is, or I should say “was,” Cree.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was writing in English using English tone, diction, sounds, rules of grammar and syntax, which is why I wanted to break the rules of syntax and grammar in a way that helped me to make sense of the emotions I felt. I wanted people to wonder and to feel the “foreignness” of another language, and yet still be curious about it.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>You do that so well, especially in poems like “ᐁᒋᑫ ᐃᐧᔭᓯᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ.” I feel like I completely understand that poem, while also not being able to read a large portion of it. And I’m left curious for more.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the book’s preface, you write of the guilt you feel “as I write in English and struggle to name emotions, places, and things in ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ nêhiyawêwin." Over the course of researching and writing this book, did you find it became easier to express yourself in ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ nêhiyawêwin? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> I think because life and time is so limited on this Earth we must choose what is important to us to learn, and learning Cree at this point would be a challenge between working to survive, writing to thrive, and parenting to transform the past (trying, always trying). I think writing this book, and doing the research, I learned to make peace with my past in order to make way for the future. Yes, I could grieve that I did not speak or write in my language, but I could honour it and perhaps learn Cree one word at a time. I still struggle pronouncing it, trying to sound it out as it is written and sometimes (most times) saying it in a way that fluent Cree speakers would not understand.</div><div> </div><div><b>RT:</b> Do you now feel, at least, a little less guilty about your struggle?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> Yes, especially with the research. The book opens with a timeline in which I tried to make sense of my own “timeline” and how my family systems were affected by colonization, or should I say the ripple effects of contact. “Colonization” is such a blanket word but it’s definitely a term that encompasses everything that happened to Indigenous people: the ripple effect of circumstance leading to the near destruction and decimation of Indigenous cultures, traditions and languages.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In the preface, you say something interesting about colonization in relation to your writing: "writing acts as a therapeutic medium for making sense of intergenerational trauma resulting from colonialism." You also write that you "use poetic elements" to try to "figure out what language means to poetry and what poetry means to language." </div><div><br /></div><div>Could you talk about these two goals of your writing? Are there ways in which they are distinct from one another, or do you think of them as a shared goal, united by the impacts of colonialism on both peoples and their languages?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK: </b>I wanted to use poetic elements like tone, diction, syntax, meter, form etc. to weave my way through discovery and what it felt like to write in another language which wasn’t my own, but which was the only language I spoke. It felt foreign and still feels foreign to try to sound out Cree words, like I am trying to learn a second language when it should be my first. I have talked to many fluent Cree speakers, and they have all said that the Cree language is descriptive. For example, aski pwawa is Cree for potato but does not translate to just potato; it actually translates to “Earth’s Egg.” </div><div><br /></div><div>The Cree language is poetic and changes over time. For example, a table is not just a table. In English when we say table, we all see a table, we all know what a table is. But in the Cree language mîcisowinâhtik loosely translates to “something made out of wood that we eat on.” So the word “table” had to be descriptive to describe what it is used for. </div><div><br /></div><div>Imagine we all went around describing things without using the word; a table wouldn’t be a table but something made out of wood that we eat on. A potato wouldn’t be just a potato but an Earth egg; which conjures up more of an interesting image? Perhaps a broken heart would be something like grieving the loss of a loved one who still walks the Earth, or grieving the loss of a loved one who no longer walks the Earth. That is what poetry is, it is description, it is imagery, and it is relatable to the human experience.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHCV59fCAKc-F2IGHzfKPEl5qdl8geOHQvVgy7fs_HpgVI0PiS4ETHiMe2rhrSvf6-9a04TEsjzC2ugzsd_VuhHFFnp0aDW3ZMUCrgQpb9_jqgyRJR2JsDmRbb3fylIwNN9Jol5sCCVfXKhbkAD-qKLTRinz5Sq4-mVGxCIwqNF9bj6HVe8tp/s466/Dog%20House.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="340" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHCV59fCAKc-F2IGHzfKPEl5qdl8geOHQvVgy7fs_HpgVI0PiS4ETHiMe2rhrSvf6-9a04TEsjzC2ugzsd_VuhHFFnp0aDW3ZMUCrgQpb9_jqgyRJR2JsDmRbb3fylIwNN9Jol5sCCVfXKhbkAD-qKLTRinz5Sq4-mVGxCIwqNF9bj6HVe8tp/s320/Dog%20House.jpg" width="233" /></a></div><b>RT: </b>What a wonderful, and yes, poetic, way to think about the world around us. In addition to you your work between languages, you also show a broader interest in formal experimentation. <i>In the Dog House</i> featured a number of concrete poems (a spiral, a diamond, a wine bottle and glass...), and your interest in playing with shape seems to have only grown since then. </div><div><br /></div><div>In your new book, alongside more traditional free verse poems, we find list poems (like “ᐁᒋᑫ ᐃᐧᔭᓯᐁᐧᐃᐧᐣ”), prose poems, blackout poems, contrapuntal poems, a golden shovel, an eleven-page essay, poems with words replacing punctuation, poems with surprising use of slashes, etc. It feels like hardly any two poems are written in the same mode. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> Thanks for explaining to me what I did because I didn’t really think about the differences! I am giggling to think how different my writing is from my first book. The poem in a spiral, “Chai Tea Rant,” had such emotionally upsetting content for me to talk about, but I could express it better when it was hard to read. It was like being able to stand in my truth and to speak it. Those who took the time to read it were meant to read it, and those who skipped it because it was too hard weren’t meant to read it. I think concrete poems offer a container to speak and stand in one’s truth, and it’s up to the reader to decipher it or not to decipher it.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> I love that. In a sense you’re saying, “I had to live through this, but you’re welcome to hear my story if you’re willing to work for it.” What inspired you to range even more widely, formally, in this book? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> My first book was written in a depression, the second at the tail end of the depression and this third book was written in a time where I finally understood how all the negative things that happened in my life were bigger than me, even bigger than my family. It became more of a macro-problem and not just a “me” problem. For years I questioned myself, “Why can’t I just get over it? Why can’t I just forget about it? Am I crazy? Why is my life so horrible compared to others? Why? Why? Why?” I had so many unanswered questions and the only way I could process the past, present and even the future was to write about it. Writing has always given me a better understanding of any situation. Writing, for me, is truly a gift and has helped me come to terms with the past. (That and years of counselling!)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> That makes a lot of sense to me—each new question you unpacked required a new shape. Considering how formally diverse the resulting book is, did you always imagine it as a single collection, or did you bring the disparate parts together later in the process? Did you consider writing a more traditional prose memoir?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> While doing my MFA at UBC, I wanted to create space to write about things that troubled me, or things that I wanted to figure out, or even things I wanted to imagine. This collection became the spells (things that mystified me), wishes and the talking dead where I imagined my ancestors could speak through me or where I could have the hindsight to feel the emotional pain and turmoil they must have gone through.</div><div><br /></div><div>In my first book, I had a poem called “Colonial Pest-Aside.” That was such a hard poem to write, to re-read and to edit to get just right. I imagined what it was like to be “force fed words of righteousness,” to be called savages, and how much pain and suffering that would cause all the ancestors hearing it while still praying for future children to have a chance to fall in love with their culture and themselves as perfect creations just as they are. I guess this collection is an autobiographical book of poetry.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think my next book will be a memoir.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Ah, I sensed that might be the case. I hope you write it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Some of your formal experimentations brought to mind other female Indigenous poets, notably Layli Long Soldier and <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2022/09/my-body-knows-more-than-i-do-interview.html">Jónína Kirton</a>. Could you talk a little about the role Indigenous women poets have played in helping you see what might be possible in your own work?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> While doing my MFA, one of our assignments was to do a presentation about a poet we admired. My instructor, Bronwen Tate, suggested I look at Long Soldier’s work. I was fascinated by Long Soldier’s ability to write powerful, short-lined poetry and also to be able to talk about the harsh truths of history in a way where she did not care about the consequences of her words. This set my writing free. At the time I still wasn’t able to “blaspheme” the church or the government for fear of some sort of repercussion (I’m not sure what). I had the opportunity to both read Long Soldier’s work and interview her over Zoom. I was in awe of her and her work. I thanked her profusely for her time and probably asked all the wrong questions! I admired her ability to “stand in her truth” and to put it on paper in such a powerful way.</div><div><br /></div><div>Jonina Kirton is another poet who has taught me to keep moving forward and to “stand in my truth” from her ability to be vulnerable in her work. She shares her vulnerabilities so others can feel comfortable in theirs.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> A recurring theme in your book’s first section, "ᒪᒪᐦᑖᐃᐧᓯᐃᐧᐣ mamahtâwisiwin Spells," is negative self-images. "I am fat / I am ugly / I am dumb / I am clingy / I am boring / I am worthless / I am a worthless Indian // I wear my trauma garlic / to the vampire party," you write in "Monkeys in the Brain." Did writing this book, or writing poetry in general, help you shape your own self-image in a more positive way? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> These are things I told myself for years. I think as human beings trying to be like the others in school, at work, at church, online, etc. leaves our state of humanness with “monkeys in the brain.” Growing up with dysfunction and trauma, I lost myself in books I could escape into and not once did I read about productive “Indians” or smart “Indians” or even beautiful “Indians.” I learned to see myself as not good enough. If only I was white or had blue eyes, or blonde hair, or was fatter (I was very skinny as a child) or skinnier (weight gain in my later years), or had whiter teeth, better teeth, better skin… the list went on. The monkeys in my brain partied a lot! Learning about the history of Kanata with Indigenous People, healing through reading, self-reflection and counselling, meeting the people I did, and allowing myself to be vulnerable has really helped. I’m now able to let that vulnerability show without judgment. When the monkeys in the brain are partying, I tell them we are ok, I got this, and that I can take care of them. Those monkeys in the brain are just fear, and have kept me alive.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> What effect do you hope this book will have on the self-image of young (or old!) Indigenous readers?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> I think the idea of self-image is easier to digest when someone else shows you their vulnerabilities and you find out you still admire them, and even admire them more because they stand in their truth and make space for you to stand in yours (like Vera Manuel). When someone’s words resonate with you or bring up emotions which you forgot you had, or perhaps thought you’d figured out, you realise you are still hiding. It helps others to be brave and accept their humanness as well. We are all spiritual beings living the human experience and if we can navigate life knowing our humanness is flawed and that’s okay, we will be okay. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In the book's closing section, "ᓂᑭᐦᒋ ᐋᓂᐢᑯᑖᐹᐣ nikihci-âniskotâpân The Talking Dead," you write about your Great-Great-Great Grandfather Chief Kihiw. Could you tell us a little about him? </div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilrIZqFhnw8hdausmTce73aRGRHACGI5trK25zhqrisSPEGyABRorSAwCtxihAAOCrLeWhExX1LqNt2Ov1Lf2ZWR8BK_YCfVs8-fwS2CDDKqFfqfiAPhhVzyroo6BBHq48dSDQtThnqIT4WU-KP-dAfCVpG4H93a8skN8XdmOdQWqZ554HLixC/s440/Visions.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilrIZqFhnw8hdausmTce73aRGRHACGI5trK25zhqrisSPEGyABRorSAwCtxihAAOCrLeWhExX1LqNt2Ov1Lf2ZWR8BK_YCfVs8-fwS2CDDKqFfqfiAPhhVzyroo6BBHq48dSDQtThnqIT4WU-KP-dAfCVpG4H93a8skN8XdmOdQWqZ554HLixC/s320/Visions.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>WJK:</b> My uncle Victor, who passed away, was a kind, generous and compassionate man who fully supported my educational pursuits. I was proud to share with him what I was doing because he would tell me he was proud. Uncle Victor loved to talk to me about oral history, which was not in books but had been passed down to him. Chief Kihiw was not in many historical records (I did find him in Census records, though). My Uncle Victor would tell me about the friendships between Chief Kihiw, Chief Big Bear and Chief Sweetgrass, and about who we were related to and where everyone came from because “back in the day” people were scattered. Uncle Victor told me of a time when the three chiefs would meet to discuss not signing the treaties, but they were starving. This relationship can be seen in my graphic novel series by Portage & Main Press, <i><a href="https://www.portageandmainpress.com/Books/V/Visions-of-the-Crow">Visions of the Crow</a></i>. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> At one point you write that he is "alive in my daughter." How do you see Chief Kihiw in her? How do you see him in yourself?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> When I say Chief Kihiw is alive in my daughter, I mean the blood memory. I think a part of culture is also the feeling we have with cultural objects as well as our relationship with place. I travel home once or twice a year to Kehewin reservation and it is home. It is a place that also holds so many past memories of suffering, but it is also a place of love. The love of the animals that live there, the family that is still struggling to survive (survival mode), the laughter that happens to alleviate the pain, and the want to ease the pain of another through small deeds. I see Chief Kihiw in myself as a word warrior who has an obligation to make things better for future generations and my gift is writing, so that is what I am trying to do. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>On the subject of that gift, in "Dead Porcupines Aren't Just For Jewellery," you write "I don’t make jewellery. I don’t create art. / I don’t Powwow dance. / I write poems." Could you talk a little more about this—about how you feel your writing poetry fits within more externally-recognized Cree arts (beadwork, powwow dancing, etc.)? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK:</b> I think writing poetry has given me the ability to make sense of the world around me. Pre-contact, everyone would have had their “roles” that helped create a circle of life. I don’t mean roles in such a predetermined, forced position, but more in a communal context where each and every person who is part of a community has a responsibility to that community. We all do not have the same strengths or gifts. A baby is born, becomes a child, then and adult, then a knowledge carrier or, in contemporary terms, an Elder. In each of these stages of life, there would have been hunters, gatherers, drummers, storytellers, child minders, clothing makers and this list goes on. There would have been navigators as well. I think I would have been a storyteller. Poetry is an act of telling a story. A storyteller can hold an entire lifetime through their choice of poetic elements. A beginning, a middle and an end, that’s what life is.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> I admire your careful attention to the tools of a storyteller, especially the language they use. At the end of the book you write, "one day I hope to write a poetry book in nêhiyawêwin," and that the process of moving more and more towards writing in ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ nêhiyawêwin is like "decolonizing myself one word at a time." </div><div><br /></div><div>This reminded me of Kikuyu novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who published the book <i>Decolonising the Mind</i> shortly after his decision, in the late 70s, to write his books in Gikuyu instead of English. On the subject, he wrote that switching to local languages would force "those who express themselves in African languages to strive for local relevance in their writing because no peasant or worker is going to buy novels, plays, or books of poetry that are totally irrelevant to his situation." </div><div><br /></div><div>If you one day write a book of poems entirely in ᓀᐦᐃᔭᐍᐏᐣ nêhiyawêwin, do you think it will change, in some way, the nature of what you write about, or how you write it? Will you strive more for "local relevance," and if so what do you think that would look like?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>WJK: </b>I have not heard of <i>Decolonising the Mind</i>, so thank you. I will add it to my list of things to read. The list keeps getting bigger and bigger. </div><div><br /></div><div>If one day I do write a book totally in nêhiyawêwin, I imagine it will be a short book, really thinking hard about the scope of this considering I do not speak it. Will it change the nature of what I write about? I do not have an answer but I do know coming out on the other side of trauma has already changed the way I write. Perhaps a lot of things will change the way I write, even the lack of time changes the way I write. So I think a book of Cree poems will be in all Cree reserve libraries and universities as one of those “oddities” or one-offs. Someone may write a paper on it trying to figure out why a poet would do the painstaking labor of writing a poetry entirely in Cree without being fluent in it. I think this could be done with a Cree translator translating it as best they could, because according to every fluent Cree speaker I have spoken with, the Cree language is so descriptive and sometimes so hard to describe in English. A joke in Cree can make a group of fluent speakers laugh but when they try to translate it in English it isn’t funny anymore and the person trying to translate it becomes flustered. The joke becomes lost—so would it be the same with poetry? </div></div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.wandajohnkehewin.com/">Wanda John-Kehewin</a> is a Cree writer who came to Vancouver, BC from the prairies on a Greyhound when she was nineteen and pregnant—carrying a bag of chips, thirty dollars, and a bit of hope. Wanda has been writing about the near decimation of Indigenous culture, language and tradition as a means to process history and trauma that allows her to stand in her truth and to share that truth openly. Wanda has published poetry, children’s books, graphic novels and a middle-grade reader with hopes of reaching others who are trying to make sense of the world around them. With many years of traveling (well mostly stumbling) the healing path, she brings personal experience of healing to share with others. Wanda is a mother of five children, two dogs, two cats, three tiger barb fish, and a hamster.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-69973442247342212842023-12-19T09:00:00.076-08:002023-12-19T09:00:00.133-08:00A Little Clearer and Cleaner: An Interview with David Zieroth<p> <em>The following interview is part six of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>Devín Castle </b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><br /></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a ruin above the confluence of</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the clear Morava with the deeper</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">darker Danube it fails to influence</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">and where men watched from heights</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">while water flowed past and past</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">endless in the possibilities of seasons</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">and terrors but also hours when</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a guardsman’s attention drifted toward</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">his night meal of meat, nuts or soup</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">while the wind blew his way,</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the smells of mud and freshets spilling</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">near fresh burial mounds</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">and as he fingered his iron weapons</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">one slipped from his animal belt </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to appear much later among amber</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">in an exhibit around which students</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">cluster, perhaps one of them aware</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">how time has thrown him up here</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">among his smoking, joking peers</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to speak Slovak, to wear jeans</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to find his body a mystery he worries </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">may never be easily understood </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">under my hand the cold rock that forms</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">this wall is solid, but I know better:</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">Miro takes my photo, which becomes</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>memento mori</i> when days from now</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">I discover it has remained unchanged</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">in my camera – still the same squint </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the grey sky behind showing no sign</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">of Perun, god of lightning and thunder –</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">whereas this very hand is less </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the sure thing, and yet it serves still </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to crumble more stone</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">into the river below as I reach out</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to my friend’s hand and climb down from </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the bastion – and so we return to our own </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">sensibilities, heartened here among</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">scrambling teens ablaze, the beauty of</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a summer evening before them </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">sunlight slanting into warm gold </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">just at that moment when it sinks –</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">which I might notice more than they</blockquote><div><br /></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9781990776021">the trick of staying and leaving</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Harbour Publishing, 2023)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9KPon4PCvGlegFsMLtyk9DgahaHsNuxWRAe5Q3-r3dyQsFTZ5_lSrJNrowz8ga87HnU6opZwCDGWHHS8MJNajpGznZhM8SypGSamxtvWQ4tAiZ2ySL4UxxoFfXMczTSajafkjCbMTyUZHSBiCIZnWpVlfmIXFUIjVrKH-pKoHpXXmW952KIi/s1200/DavidZieroth-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9KPon4PCvGlegFsMLtyk9DgahaHsNuxWRAe5Q3-r3dyQsFTZ5_lSrJNrowz8ga87HnU6opZwCDGWHHS8MJNajpGznZhM8SypGSamxtvWQ4tAiZ2ySL4UxxoFfXMczTSajafkjCbMTyUZHSBiCIZnWpVlfmIXFUIjVrKH-pKoHpXXmW952KIi/w400-h210/DavidZieroth-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div><b>Rob Taylor: </b>The "trick" in your new collection, <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9781990776021">the trick of staying and leaving</a></i>, is performed by the Danube river, which stays fixed in one place while also flowing constantly away. You've gone and published two books in six months: Fall 2022’s <i><a href="https://www.mqup.ca/watching-for-life-products-9780228014744.php">watching for life</a></i>, set on a balcony in North Vancouver, and this new book, set in Slovakia. Despite taking place half a world apart, the two feel, in many ways, like the same river. Both combine a still observer and their ever-moving observations (in the first of the Slovakia poems you position the speaker "at a second-floor window seat," mirroring the balcony in <i>watching for life</i>). Do you think of these books a shared gesture set in two different places, or is there some change in the spirit of the writing from place to place? Perhaps a change in the spirit of the author?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>David Zieroth: </b>In both books I think of the speaker as a careful observer, sometimes distanced; and yet the spirit of the two books feels quite different to me. While <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i> comprises all pre-Covid poems except for one ("driving country roads in Slovakia"), the poems in <i>watching for life</i> were written during and after (can I say after?) the pandemic. The Slovak poems would have been published earlier except for the arrival of the uncertainties spawned by Covid, so the autobiographical order is not the same as the publishing one. For me the Slovak book feels more open because I'm out in the world exploring and experiencing with people I admire and love. The balcony book feels a lot lonelier. It's just me looking out and intuiting connections with others. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Ah, I hadn’t made the Covid connection. The tonal differences between the two books make a lot more sense to me. Still, I feel they hold a great deal in common.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I remember reading a quip from Michael Ondaatje who, when asked about something in his poem, said something to the effect that if one little nuance shifted it was all different. I admit to not having a larger view of how these two books might be similar, but I can easily see them as different. Then again doesn't every poet feel that the last thing he wrote is the masterpiece that practically annuls all previous work? Perspective on my past work is not one of my strengths. I have a handful of readers (some poets, others poetry lovers) who read my poems in manuscript, and they are renowned for their truth telling. Sometimes what I thought to be pure genius is greeted with cool respect but little warmth or pleasure, whereas a poem I hardly noticed is applauded generously. Which just goes to show you what I know about such things, eh?</div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_cR8eJF3cmBGnXQwKl0x7r92CroPv6buamF_4tvOOsJQXlESWSESWMuscONlTnGJJcta165i2YYkF6DnEOlFFsgEgZOZw2mCPG9z7Duxl_vlXntgnjiAIV9aOC6ryDiIRsSk8vlY_AQsbGKNzcPAtVUw5ZtKpkYH0GrQzC6umGa9bxbekODm/s810/trick.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="810" data-original-width="540" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_cR8eJF3cmBGnXQwKl0x7r92CroPv6buamF_4tvOOsJQXlESWSESWMuscONlTnGJJcta165i2YYkF6DnEOlFFsgEgZOZw2mCPG9z7Duxl_vlXntgnjiAIV9aOC6ryDiIRsSk8vlY_AQsbGKNzcPAtVUw5ZtKpkYH0GrQzC6umGa9bxbekODm/s320/trick.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>RT:</b> Ha, I think that’s true for all of us. It’s much easier for me to ask you questions about changes in your writing style than to answer those same questions myself. So let’s stick with you! Over the years you've developed a distinct style, used in both these books: one or one-and-a-half page poems composed of 6-10 syllable lines, without capitalization or periods. Commas, too, are used sparingly at the end of lines—only seven total across both books (~2,000 lines)! </div><div><br /></div><div>Many elements of this style are present in your poetry all the way back to 2006's<i> The Village of Sliding Time</i>, and perhaps further, but it didn't seem to become your exclusive mode until 2014's <i>Albrecht Dürer and me</i>. Could you talk a little about the evolution of this style? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> Oh, punctuation, my former lovely chains! I like your comment about my "evolution of style," which I think is accurate. I don't recall making a deliberate decision to drop punctuation in the way I have. What seems to have happened is that the intensity of the incoming poem requires so much attention that I'm in a rush to get it down before it passes off into the ether, and so it's all about the exact words and rhythms in the words themselves. The effect may be what Miranda Pearson calls "mesmerizing" on the back of <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i>. I'm less concerned about how the reader will manage stepping through the words, and while I do make an effort to smooth their journey through to that moment at the end when all is revealed, so to speak, the lack of normal punctuation can make that experience sometimes just a little tricky. That's not my intention, but the reader must pay close attention, especially when the language appears so everyday at times. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> What does having one consistent approach to a poem's form free up for you in your writing? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> Leaving capitals and periods and sometimes other bits behind is freeing. I have felt closer than ever to that ineffable thing that happens when the words arrive, and I want no shackles near. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> What has writing without periods, capitalization and end-of-line commas taught you about rhythm and pacing in poetry?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ</b>: Perhaps it's like this: when I went to a naturist beach in Croatia with my Slovak friends for the first time I was a tad shy and concerned, and then when my clothes were off and so were everyone else's I never felt so free and so relaxed.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Ha! Yes, that sounds right. Though I don’t think I agree with you that your style makes it tricky for readers—I think the reader is equally unshackled (regardless of their opinions on nude beaches). This connects to what is, to me, the defining trait of a David Zieroth poem: motion. Even if the scene described is seemingly mundane, we are always moving seamlessly through it: the camera-work of the poem captivates us as much as what that camera is pointing at. </div><div><br /></div><div>In "Devín Castle," for instance, we move so effortlessly from the past to the present, and from crumbling stone to crumbling hand. (If your poems were films, I sense they would be filmed in one unending shot—panning, sweeping, rising—like <i>Birdman</i> or <i>1917</i>). I suspect that, in part, this has to do with the punctuation choices discussed above, but also goes beyond that. Perhaps there's a chicken and an egg here—the fluidity of form and content. Could you talk about motion in your poems? Does how a poem moves matter more to you, in some ways, than what the poem says?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> Motion, eh? Or is it ease of movement? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Yes, steady internal movement from image to image, thought to thought (even if the speaker is utterly still on a balcony). And with no periods anywhere to slow that flow.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I have not thought of my poems in this way, but it's true my concern is to keep the poem moving, to present visuals and thoughts and feelings all together so the reader has no desire to pause and put the poem down and reach for a cheezie. It's also true that my poems often start in circumstances that are generally easily recognizable and then they veer elsewhere, taking us into something equally recognizable but not expected, something revealed in the speaker that perhaps he himself is startled to discover right there before him. That following the golden thread in blind faith and always with the hope (and even the expectation, which is not the same) that ahead lies the understanding and experience which until that very moment did not exist anywhere at all. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps I might put it this way: I write to find what the initial idea or inspiration wants me to find, and I feel this process not only creates action on the page but also is the most exhilarating and exciting in my life, and also the healthiest. I recall often how my family back in the busy days when we were all younger would kindly hope that I might take my grumpy self away for an hour to write in order that I may return to them as my more genial self, a little clearer and cleaner having dipped my soul into the river that flows through me when the writing is good.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Wonderfully put. I'd be remiss to conduct an interview with you without asking about <a href="http://d-zieroth.squarespace.com/the-alfred-gustav-press">The Alfred Gustav Press</a>, your subscription-based chapbook press which I've long believed to be Canadian literature's best kept secret. Publishing 6-8 chapbooks each year since 2008, you recently surpassed 100 in total! I want to express my gratitude for all that work. What has editing and publishing all those manuscripts taught you about compiling your own?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I've written about The Alfred Gustav Press <a href="https://samizdatpress.typepad.com/hal_issue_fifteen-1/when-i-make-a-chapbook-by-david-zieroth-1.html">elsewhere</a>, so I won't comment about the press itself here except to say it's a labour of love that five people (not counting the poets) are happy to continue. What have I learned? I like it best when a poet sends us a large handful of poems in a submission out of which we can then find the chapbook. I already knew and have learned again that it's so difficult to see one's own work. When I am the poet gathering together poems into a manuscript, I look first at the concentrated moment in each of the poems and not so much on how they may link with others in image or action. It's then that I call on my friends to tell me how they see the arrangement and the order, and it's their understanding and wisdom I rely on for the final presentation before sending it off to a publisher (where again further shape changes can occur). </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Let’s talk a little about the particular nature of each of these books. In its cover, jacket copy, blurbs, etc. <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i> is pitched as a book about Slovakia, but more fundamentally it feels like a book about friendship. I could imagine the book existing without traveling to Slovakia, but I couldn't imagine it without Miro and his family, and the ways you were able to see yourself anew through their eyes. Could you tell us a bit about Miro?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I met Miro ten years ago in a coffee shop in North Van. We hit it off right away and soon were friends. He was here from Slovakia for a few months to help his daughter adjust to attending school where she was learning English and our Canadian ways. Miro and I spent time together walking around the city learning English and Slovak words. He has returned here a few times since that autumn of 2013, and I have visited his home several times as well. Covid-19 made a huge difference to his life (more than to mine, I think), and in spite of travel restrictions and upheavals, etc., we have stayed connected. Now the English he learned here is slowly disappearing (just as the few Slovak words I learned then are slipping away). Today he's the entrepreneurial energy behind a thriving physiotherapy clinic in Bratislava. I will be seeing him and his family and friends again this coming summer. We often take a road trip to different parts of Slovakia, and he's been a wonderful guide to places tourists would not likely see.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> How did Miro help guide you to this book? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> Because of his friendship, I have learned to see worlds new to me and to question old, even unconscious, assumptions in new ways. I am also among the greatly fortunate because my daughter and her family live in Vienna, and Bratislava is only an hour away by bus, Vienna and Bratislava being the two closest national capitals in the world. <i>the trick of staying and leaving </i>is about both family and friends and about the kind of understanding that comes with new experiences in new territories/countries.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>In the book you write, of learning Slovak, "even the most polite / cannot always keep mirth / from erupting / when I speak, my mouth / filled with too much or not enough." Language being "too much or not enough" feels like the poet's perpetual challenge: we are always trying to get the world down in words, but we're never quite able. Did you feel a poetic familiarity in being lost in a language? What did starting over in another language teach you about writing in English?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ: </b>I am always lost in Slovak. Like any language it's very complex: masculine, feminine, gender and nuances well beyond me. I really only have a handful of words I can say with any tonal accuracy. I love the music of the language and enjoy hearing my friends talk (the younger generation are willing and apt translators). Perhaps more importantly, I never understand English so well as when I see others struggling with its pronunciation and many idioms. In some perhaps forgivable way I didn't grasp the challenge of English. I was raised with relatives who spoke German to each other, and I now have grandchildren who speak German, and yet I seem to have little capacity for other languages. I was often told that, because I heard another language as a child and because I was a wordsmith, surely I would be able to pick up another language easily. Such are the myths my experiences have dispelled. I now have a greater respect for those of us writing in English with all its snaky “s” sounds, and there's no doubt I have much greater appreciation of the efforts of Canadians who are learning English as their second language. And any experience of the nuance of language gives a heightened awareness of the word.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In writing about a foreign place, an author must feel conflicting pressures: to be both highly present in that place and record it accurately, and also to consider their "home" readership, for whom some level of explanation/translation will be necessary. The author has to think here and there at once. How did you balance the two in writing <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i>? Did you strike your particular balance in the initial composition, or did you grapple with the issue of audience only during the editing process? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I'm operating intuitively when it comes to the audience. In the time of writing the poem, the initial inspiration can mean minutes (with revision lasting hours or indeed much longer), and the urgency and energy of the poem doesn't allow me to think much about who will be reading the poem, if and when it reaches the public. In general, I try not to think of audience when first writing a poem as awareness of audience as a presence over one's shoulder impedes the flow of feelings into words. What I wanted to do in <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i> was convey the joy and bewilderment that can be experienced by any traveler in a foreign land. Perhaps I am somewhat equipped for this process by a love of these people and places and by a long-ago undergraduate degree in history that enables me to have a perspective with a longer than usual time frame. Perhaps there is another trick in this staying and leaving: being in the here and now and also back there at home intuitively with that audience.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGiu1Jy8EsPmaBGZqp2NphR97wNRhVm4tHqIdvUUp2tNEQhS35ggGwEG4-lc93lDS9Nlte6ZrMNiKFNXUIWL_-YdXH9_Bjc0hUiQ0UziEzgqsgvSIOen0HKpVx5XikddlodPCikFXyoGo3OhJfoh8XfL_U6eHNRJndkIYMiCtqILUpSUo-mUxZ/s600/watching.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGiu1Jy8EsPmaBGZqp2NphR97wNRhVm4tHqIdvUUp2tNEQhS35ggGwEG4-lc93lDS9Nlte6ZrMNiKFNXUIWL_-YdXH9_Bjc0hUiQ0UziEzgqsgvSIOen0HKpVx5XikddlodPCikFXyoGo3OhJfoh8XfL_U6eHNRJndkIYMiCtqILUpSUo-mUxZ/s320/watching.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>RT: </b><i>watching for life</i> is a book set entirely “back home” in North Vancouver. Its poems teem with rain, fog, gulls, crows... In this, and also in their meditative movement, they often reminded me of <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-mystery-of-where-you-come-from.html">Russell Thornton</a>'s poetry (perhaps especially his book <i>Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain</i>). Thornton is thanked—along with five others, that “handful of readers” you mentioned earlier—in the acknowledgments of both books, and blurbs them both. How have his poetry, and his poetic eye on your work, shaped your writing? Your thinking about North Vancouver?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ: </b>It's not surprising that Russell's poems come to mind when you read <i>watching for life</i>. We share the same climate, and while I've lived in North Vancouver longer than anywhere else on earth, I did not have the blessing of being born here as Russell did, and the rain in his poems speaks in its mother tongue. Russell is a friend and a neighbour and one of the smartest people I know, as well as a poet whose awareness of poetic traditions I admire and envy. He has been a very helpful reader of my poems. But he writes in a way that is very different from me, much more in the ecstatic vein of poetry than I do. His instincts and methods are not mine or vice versa. I don't think he's been much of a poetic influence at all, even as I love his poetry. I've long ago given up trying to do what I admire in other poets; I have plenty simply trying to do what I do. But Russell has certainly helped me to see my poems more clearly than I might otherwise have had I not had his counsel at times. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>In <i>watching for life</i>, while dreaming of Paris from North Vancouver, you write "sometimes I... think / hard about how I came here and not / to some other, more beautiful, famous / place." Yet in your travels you chose to devote such time not to France or Italy or Greece, but famous-adjacent Slovakia (the North Vancouver of Europe?). What do you think it is that compels you, despite competing urges, to these edges instead of the centres? Do you have a similar instinct in your poetry, in what you write about or how you write it?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ:</b> I was raised on a farm in Manitoba, far from any centre and yet central to everything I was for years and which in some ways is still active in me. Slovakia initially attracted me because of the friends I made who were from there. No one in Bratislava is very far from the countryside. It's the central European capital most likely to be overlooked. I find a molecular comfort in places less touted, where I might rediscover a bit of that person I once was in the way he looks at what hasn't suffered too much from touristic photo-erosion. Perhaps the real connection is between Manitoba and Slovakia, and perhaps it is possible that similarities between backgrounds drew me unconsciously to Miro. Certainly I enjoy the rural world there and feel resonances of farm life not far from the city. I laughed and enjoyed the time we were stuck driving on a country road behind a load of manure that after the first few minutes caused us to roll up our car windows that until then had been offering pure summer air on the road to Orava.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Images of falling or flying off precipices recur in both of your new books. In a poem in <i>watching for life</i>, you write "I'm learning to die by seeking always to live," and that duality seems ever-present in both books: the fall and the flight. Could you talk a little about the role death (and its accompaniments fear, clarity, etc.) played in writing these books? Was its influence the same in each?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ: </b>Perhaps because I was born in November I was aware early on of the dying of light. Perhaps because I was raised on a farm with the natural birth and death of animals, I grew wary of living as if death didn't exist. And that flying, that jumping off precipices in the poems, creates what surely everyone feels: something of that pull, that attraction to lift off from our heavy-footed pedestrian selves and to fly, even if only for a few minutes, the waiting death be damned. Like other writers I believe we are given only a few themes that we must work through over and over again, and awareness of death in life is one of them for me. That theme in <i>watching for life</i> is, I think, more sharply expressed than in <i>the trick of staying and leaving</i> because in the former book I was more isolated during its writing. Of course one doesn't want to be morbid because such a state would annul the joy of living, of which there is plenty: think of the friendships I have experienced, the new places I've seen, the pleasure I've relished in travel, the love received and given. But there is always death to return to, like a comfortable bed at the end of the day's journey. One might as well grow accustomed to what's waiting, and what better way to do that than to turn one's thoughts in that direction now and then as one often does before sleep.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Your first book came out in 1973, making 2023 your fiftieth year publishing poetry books. Despite all those years, it feels like you're speeding up your rate of production—three poetry books in the past five years! To what do you attribute this acceleration? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ: </b>When something huge is bearing down on you, your instinct is to step out of the way. When that option isn't available, then you speed up and hope to avoid a little longer that cataclysmic meeting. Perhaps that explains my acceleration. That and the fact that I am retired from outside work and hence I'm able to devote my time to the great loves of my life: reading and writing. I don't have a television, I rarely watch movies, and so I find myself in the enviable state of being free to read and write. I think I have at least one more book in me, perhaps two, and I am sifting through my previous publications as well in attempting to compile a Selected. This I am doing with the help again of friends who have alerted me to look again at poems from the past that I might very well have dismissed or overlooked, my eye somehow always needing to be elsewhere. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>A Selected—I can’t wait to read it! Have you sensed, in your sifting, that what you want from a poem, or a book of poems, has changed? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DZ: </b>At the moment my poems are getting shorter, as if a new kind of lyricism has emerged as part of my late style. But of course one little shift and everything changes…</div><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.davidzieroth.com/">David Zieroth</a>’s <i>The Fly in Autumn</i> (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. Zieroth also won The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for <i>How I Joined Humanity at Last</i> (Harbour, 1998). He watches urban life from his third-floor balcony in North Vancouver, BC, where he runs The Alfred Gustav Press and produces handmade poetry chapbooks twice per year.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-43028047464108705092023-12-12T09:00:00.004-08:002024-01-02T04:29:19.714-08:00Close to the Barbed Wire: An Interview with Tāriq Malik<p><em>The following interview is part five of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>The City Lights of Sialkot</b><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><b><br /></b><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>When it is dark enough<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>our whole family climbs to the rooftop<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>to witness the unaccustomed glow<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> creeping across the southern hemisphere<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>marking the miracle of electricity<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> inching towards our home<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> to forever blot out our familiar<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> and created stars<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>Abaji waves at it<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> and says one word<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> Sialkot<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>he holds my hand tight<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> whispering<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> soon soon<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>That is the moment<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>ammiji knows that her other child<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> will be a girl<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>and that she will name her<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>Roshni<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> Light<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>Somewhere in the distance<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote>a steam locomotive sounds its whistle<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> the wave travelling ten miles<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"></blockquote> over unharvested fields<br />before striking our home</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://caitlinpress.com/Books/E/Exit-Wounds">Exit Wounds</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Caitlin Press, 2022)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEUW1EKc7wJxMOyRYWYDlEk5ojiVhy6Cz-Ju-rxnJ4FJXc-GMfL-c3F5uXOYGoXkw8o15buV6eaYBNwoK4hziALgUkyzT5OaiVI8e8Wr6KxQy0ajx16LDVUTnNIlx0CKOF2dz1vxt6dARMhseKhznwikxzec5DT0F5_dcl2JbFjMbI0FuOBi7T/s1200/TariqMalik-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEUW1EKc7wJxMOyRYWYDlEk5ojiVhy6Cz-Ju-rxnJ4FJXc-GMfL-c3F5uXOYGoXkw8o15buV6eaYBNwoK4hziALgUkyzT5OaiVI8e8Wr6KxQy0ajx16LDVUTnNIlx0CKOF2dz1vxt6dARMhseKhznwikxzec5DT0F5_dcl2JbFjMbI0FuOBi7T/w400-h210/TariqMalik-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> Poems in <i><a href="https://caitlinpress.com/Books/E/Exit-Wounds">Exit Wounds</a></i> document your eviction from your house in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, and all you had to leave behind as you fled as a refugee (family videos, precious mementos, and, I assume, many a book). Could you talk a little about that experience? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Tāriq Malik: </b>When I look back at the plight of South Asian immigrants who were, and still are, working in the Middle East, all I can recall is the bruised and precariat state we were all in and the daily professional and social humiliations that we endured. We were living in an apartheid state that categorizes its citizens according to their bloodlines and clan history (e.g., the existence of the Bedouins, who were the original inhabitants of the region, is only partially acknowledged). And, as non-Kuwaitis, as South Asians, we were at the penultimate bottom of the list. That final spot was occupied by people who had no country to return to and still do not, namely the Palestinians.</div><div><br /></div><div>For us, the war further disrupted our already precarious lives, so we had to abandon all we had so diligently accumulated during our years in Kuwait. It also abruptly made all of us refugees. </div><div>As non-Kuwaitis, we were not permitted to own property, and our residences were always rented properties. Hence, I write in my poem “The Home Invaded”:</div><div><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>Though lived in for two decades </div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">my rented Kuwaiti home I never dreamt you </div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>even when locked out and distant to me </div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">only desiccated houseplants beckoned </div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">return</div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Christopher Levenson, who wrote the introduction to <i>Exit Wounds</i>, positions your books as a rarity: a Canadian poetry collection by a male South Asian poet (and, even rarer, one which focuses on South Asian history and literature). Was this something you were conscious of when writing the poems in <i>Exit Wounds</i>?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM: </b>My conscious struggle as a writer has always been for an original voice that would illuminate a lived experience in a personal and relatable manner. From my close readings of paleo-anthropologist Loren Eiseley's work, I have learned that to communicate a compelling experience or a resonant historical event, you must first relate it to your own lived history and experience; subsequently, I am always searching for that social or historical simulacrum that runs parallel to my life and which I can harness for my expression. </div><div><br /></div><div>At later stages of the manuscript I even abandoned punctuation and grammar, a technique that I find fellow poet Tolu Oloruntoba has mastered by exhorting writers to “risk clarity.”</div><div><br /></div><div>I characterized this process in a poem that tentatively begins: “all writers are flat-earthers in racing to the end of the line, and then reluctant to leap off the page, turn back to the safety of the next line—until they encounter the bottom of the page—and here they must take a leap of faith that a fresh page will allow them a landing...’</div><div>I write about borders, alienation, and expulsion, and all these states are realized as the domain of barbed wires and no-man lands where, as in my poem “Raising Nineveh,”</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The wells are poisoned</div><div style="text-align: center;">The fields salted</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">You cannot stay here</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">You are not the first</div><div style="text-align: center;">to pass this way</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Nor the last</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>2022 marked the 75th anniversary of the Indian Partition, and your book, in many ways, exists as a response to that event and its ramifications. How do you think the effects of the partition changed the course of your life? What do you think you'd be writing about if it hadn't happened, if you were writing at all?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM:</b> Growing up in a border town, the impact of the British Partition of India in 1947 was impossible to ignore. The spillover from that brutality was all around us, in the traumas of our neighbors, in the defaced buildings of our neighborhoods, including our own street where I stumbled on a painted over pre-Partition mural. This early exposure to the brutalities of recent times past, and then the personal trauma of leaving Kotli for an English boarding school, were the best education I could have had. So, even if the Partition hadn't happened, I would still be engaged with similar landscapes of human experience and historical trauma.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Yes, I’d love to talk about that mural. In your poem "1954," a boy repeatedly throwing a ball against a wall reveals a pre-partition mural of Krishna that had been whitewashed over. When he tells adults about it, he is rebuked and the mural is quickly covered over. In writing frankly about difficult events—the partition, the Komagata Maru incident, 9/11, Indigenous residential schools, the killing of Robert Dziekański, etc.—do you sometimes feel like that boy, your words pushed aside and covered over? Or have people been more respectful and open in response to your poems?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM: </b>I am glad my work is finding a home with its intended listeners and readers. And their emotional response and intellectual engagement show that I have conveyed something ineffable and essential with which they could identify. One of my roles as a writer/artist/curator is publicizing social and historical injustices. Fortunately, having lived so close to the barbed wire of police states for so long, I can continue to openly bring forth these topics in compelling ways.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> The second section of poems in <i>Exit Wounds</i>, entitled "The Lives of the Poets," includes tributes to many historical South Asian poets, including Rabindranath Tagore, Waris Shah, Mirza Ghalib and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. These poems are also larger celebrations of poetry, and especially the role poetry can play in South Asian communities. How would you describe the role of poetry in South Asia? How does it differ from its role here in Canada?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM: </b>When I speak of these South Asian poets, I refer to them as emotional touchstones that continue to inspire me. The emotional resonance of their work draws you in and leads you to engage with their work more intellectually. Faiz's creative expression continues to astound when he begins with lyrical romanticism, and then the closer you read his work, the more you realize the subliminal intellectual level layered beneath it. I am increasingly frustrated by how few western readers are aware of the caliber of his oeuvre. However, his energized and devastating use of the words <i>azadi</i> (freedom) and <i>bol</i> (speak) are now gathering resonance and traction internationally.</div><div><br /></div><div>My choice of these poets was also based on the tangential relevance of their work to the struggle for independence from colonization in general and to the Partition in particular.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>In addition to considering historical South Asian poets, in your acknowledgements you also recognize modern Canadian poets of South Asian origin, including Kuldip Gill, Sadhu Binning and Ajmer Rodhe. Could you talk a little about all of these influences - historical and modern - and how they've worked together to shape your writing?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM: </b>The influence of Sadhu Binning and Ajmer Rodhe has been critical to my creative output. Through reading their work, and my subsequent discussions with them, I re-imagined the local historical events of 1908-1914, especially the circumstances surrounding the Komagata Maru and its impact on the South Asian community in Canada. I have credited them both as my teachers in my last two books. And Kuldip Gill's poetry is an endless wellspring of inspiration for me.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In Levenson's introduction, he writes that "one senses a strong oral tradition" in your poems. You close your own forward to the book with an encouragement for the reader to "stand up and speak these words aloud—poetry must not be read in the dark or silently." Do you write your poems for public performance, and as such do you think of them as performance poems or "page" poems? Or is that distinction even relevant to you? Was it a struggle pinning your poems down to the page?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM:</b> I create work that is meant to be performed and not merely read. For instance, when I wrote the very brief poem "<strike>Entry</strike>Exit Wounds," I imagined the reader standing before an audience and hurling each insult (eight pejoratives for "immigrant," taken from eight different cultures) as stones. In fact, when I read it aloud, I hurl each term at the audience physically like a stone. Once in a while, someone in the audience will flinch reflexively. At the conclusion, I flip the common insult "go home" and toss it back at the attackers. </div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><strike>Entry</strike>Exit Wounds</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(In memoriam – Chin Banerjee 1940-2020)</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>¬Jis tara bund darvazoN pe gir-e bearish-e-sung¬—Faiz</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>MOHAJIR</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>PANAGHIR</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>RAFIQ</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>PAKI</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>IMMIGRANT</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>REFUGEE</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>WETBACK</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>FOTB</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">It is midnight already</div><div style="text-align: center;">tell those</div><div style="text-align: center;">who hurl stones at my windowpanes</div><div style="text-align: center;">heed your words</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Go home</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> The poems in <i>Exit Wounds</i> flow very naturally despite a lack of punctuation (so naturally that I didn't notice this fact until near the end of my first reading). Could you talk about your approach to line breaks and spacing, and how they recreate the pauses in natural speech?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM: </b>It was a struggle pinning the words to the pages. Often, all I wanted to do was violently break open the language to express my own rage. Hence, each poem follows a different flight to its volta. Imagine a work that has no capitalized letters. Then you encounter the tyranny of a capital "I." Besides, the small "i" conveys volumes. This technique is further illustrated in my poem "Midnight on Turtle Island," where beyond the issues of capitalized words, the narrative that takes place during the night is set in a black background, and with the end of the "Century of the Night" reverts back to black text on white. Incidentally, here all pronouns are now capitalized. "Midnight on Turtle Island" also raises several challenges for the physical reading of the poem as it presents three different narratives in three distinct voices without any assignment of speakers.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> We first met at an event hosted by the New Westminster (now Vancouver) reading series, <a href="https://poetscorner.ca/">Poet's Corner</a>. That series means enough to you that you mention it in your author bio. Could you talk about the importance of Poet's Corner in your development as a poet, and your sense of belonging within a poetry community?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>TM:</b> Poet's Corner performs a vital role in the development of poetry locally by offering up fresh voices monthly and allowing developing poets valuable exposure and a receptive audience. </div><div><br /></div><div>I would like to offer parts of this poem in concluding my take on the role of the Poet's Corner:</div><div><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>This is what I know of safe haven</div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>this is what I believe</div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>this is how I celebrate</div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">here and now</div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>Hammering out stars </div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">into the smithies of the night</div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>Each oscillating shining orb</div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">held up before your eyes</div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">tilted just so </div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>Where confident as dancers leaning into curves</div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">we skate unabashedly into our swagger </div></div></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">so close to the edge</div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">immaculate in our poise</div></div></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.writersunion.ca/member/T%C4%81riq-Malik">Tāriq Malik</a> works across poetry, fiction, and art to distill immersive, compelling, and original narratives. His working English is a borrowed tongue inflected with his inherited Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi languages. He writes intensely in response to the world in flux around him and from his place in its shadows. He came reluctantly late to these shores, having had to first survive three wars, two migrations, and two decades of slaving in the Kuwaiti desert. Tāriq Malik is the author of a short story collection, <i>Rainsongs of Kotli</i>, and a novel, <i>Chanting Denied Shores</i>. His debut poetry collection, <i>Exit Wounds</i>, was published by Caitlin Press in 2022.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-5160365408857687092023-12-05T09:00:00.117-08:002023-12-05T09:00:00.140-08:00Choosing Not To Cry: An Interview with Jane Munro<p><em>The following interview is part four of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>MacKay Creek</b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><br /></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">I cleared a shelf close to its flow</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">left hemlock cones, smoothed stones</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">heard the water’s poem</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">without knowing</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">as water knows</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">swayed on vine maple trunks </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">arched over pools and rapids</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">felt safe in a place where I had nothing </blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to achieve, no one to please</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the creek withheld nothing from me</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9781990776090">False Creek</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Harbour Publishing, 2022)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE1h3zA-r7JtwslGZERAD1XcnaewBP1AghoD1pF1WoZ1NUYwWkHT5piEYYr3K6b5NByp7eUjUum7UAVcEFIvtj5yQ671HVeY9Vj9HI66xyx6M3EcKgnGFOpQQ9-7RqBEbTZ2gbWtxGURVD8VvTcSst9U8Qd7n_OzUlXjUgZnjOiMcZ_scqIUq/s1200/JaneMunro-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcE1h3zA-r7JtwslGZERAD1XcnaewBP1AghoD1pF1WoZ1NUYwWkHT5piEYYr3K6b5NByp7eUjUum7UAVcEFIvtj5yQ671HVeY9Vj9HI66xyx6M3EcKgnGFOpQQ9-7RqBEbTZ2gbWtxGURVD8VvTcSst9U8Qd7n_OzUlXjUgZnjOiMcZ_scqIUq/w400-h210/JaneMunro-BlogBanner.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> I wanted to open this interview with your poem "MacKay Creek” because to me it stands in stark contrast with the titular creek in your new poetry collection, <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9781990776090">False Creek</a></i>. Unlike North Vancouver’s MacKay Creek, downtown Vancouver’s False Creek doesn't flow like a creek at all, and its history—especially its pre-colonial history—was withheld from you. Could you talk a little about False Creek? How did you come to see it as a focal point for the various concerns you explore in the book?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Jane Munro:</b> False Creek came first. I walked around this strange but fascinating element of the city I’d come back to, my home city. Like so much in my relationship with this place, False Creek epitomized contradictions. </div><div><br /></div><div>As a child I’d followed MacKay Creek as far up and down its flow as I could go. That creek was a real creek—one with fresh water (though maybe not potable) and traversed by bears. I played there, felt safe there, prayed there: left gifts, arranged offerings. I didn’t have the same reverence for False Creek. I studied what I could learn about its life and history trying to understand what had happened to this inlet to the heart and values of Vancouver. The city exploits land and water ways, corrupts, and reduces the natural environment.</div><div>For me, False Creek was a naked image, something odd and plain—a kind of haiku of Vancouver. My home.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoaQHcxPZENoiZHIYcVxex_IbKup4OvKWFUxZ1JynJL1ogOJS3ZstQRKj_EZi5QPEj_ksaJwoq_ripYEPiT2fxaba8P3ypUMuCkZsoYO9v-nBFfe3h11rowW38dwWhB81U9DadWYxTcyTVKSC7wRT7aMm79CPQGkHcvhi9-08pmTuzUJgKPWC7/s399/Open-Every-Window.jpeg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="399" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoaQHcxPZENoiZHIYcVxex_IbKup4OvKWFUxZ1JynJL1ogOJS3ZstQRKj_EZi5QPEj_ksaJwoq_ripYEPiT2fxaba8P3ypUMuCkZsoYO9v-nBFfe3h11rowW38dwWhB81U9DadWYxTcyTVKSC7wRT7aMm79CPQGkHcvhi9-08pmTuzUJgKPWC7/w201-h320/Open-Every-Window.jpeg.webp" width="201" /></a></div>RT:</b> In your 2021 memoir <i><a href="https://douglas-mcintyre.com/products/9781771622967">Open Every Window</a></i>, which describes your struggle with your husband's Alzheimer's, you write "We live in a time of dementia: its tsunami hitting persons we know, society's forgetfulness, even the earth losing mind with the extinction of species." In many ways, False Creek feels like an attempt to directly address "society's forgetfulness"—a repudiation of dementia and unlearning in all their forms. Would you say that's true? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM: </b>I am part of society; I am forgetful and ignorant. Going through Bob’s battle with dementia was anguishing. I project my “keel of grief” onto Vancouver by saying False Creek is Vancouver’s keel of grief. But a keel keeps a vessel upright. A keel allows one to steer – stay on course. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Did experiencing Bob’s Alzheimer's make you hungry for new learning?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM: </b>I’ve always been curious about life, our co-species, our relationships—the vastness of everything I do not know. So, yes, new learning feels urgently necessary as we face the increasingly cataclysmic impacts of our ignorance and forgetfulness. My years face-to-face with Alzheimer’s sharpened my craving, but it wasn’t a new hunger.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>You take on those cataclysmic impacts directly in False Creek, which feels like your most bluntly political book to date. It's notable, then, that it comes on the heels of a book called <i>Open Every Window</i>, which itself felt like a straight-forward response to your more delicate approach to Bob's Alzheimers in <i><a href="https://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/blue-sonoma-by-jane-munro/">Blue Sonoma</a></i> (described on the back of that book as "render[ing] difficult conditions with the lightest of touches"). Do you feel that "opening every window" in your memoir opened you up to new ways of writing the poems in False Creek?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> That’s an astute question. Yes, it probably did. I’ve always felt compelled to be as honest and accurate as possible in my writing. The tricky part is not knowing how someone else will take what I say. It took time to work through my delicacy about things I say in <i>Open Every Window</i>. I wanted to make the best art I could make. I wanted to write a book only I could write. I wanted to give others a clear sense of my experiences as a particular person living in a particular place and time.</div><div><br /></div><div>For at least the past fifty years I’ve felt we, as adults, need to change—we are in crisis. It’s too late to educate children and trust that coming generations will remedy the past. That need was my motivation for doing a doctorate in Adult Education. I wanted to learn how to facilitate transformative learning—in myself, for starters. Art was crucial—a gateway to heart and imagination—essential for transformative learning. So was story. How to change the story in our minds, in our hearts. How to open us to new ways of thinking /feeling/relating/acting. So, yes, <i>Open Every Window</i> laid the groundwork for <i>False Creek</i> though I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before. I had changed. My story had changed. The times had changed. Our crises are extreme. What I had to write had changed. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> What you had to write didn’t just change, it seems to me it expanded. For a book titled after a single location, <i>False Creek</i> ranges widely. This is attested to in the "Notes" section of the book, where facts on black holes press up against information about Aboriginal art, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Squamish and Hebrew languages, and more. The book's opening poem, similarly, begins in Pompeii and Herculaneum before ending in Vancouver. To what extent was this wide lens a choice you made, as opposed to simply what happens when you sit down to write, the whole world rushing in behind the single image?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> It’s hard to imagine any one location without including its relationships with other places and times. False Creek (as we name it now) calls up a range of other places and times—geologically and historically. The poems in the book range widely but when I was writing these poems, I did too. As the embedded point of view, I felt it only fair to sketch my own changes of location—where I go to, come from, bring to mind—in relationship with False Creek today. </div><div><br /></div><div>The title, <i>False Creek</i>, appeals to me for its irony and contradictions. “False” is a loaded word these days. We have “false news,” the politics of what is “true” to one person may not be “true” to another. I feel irony and contradiction are part of the book even when the content is not focused tightly on the inlet in the heart of Vancouver. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> <i>False Creek</i> is full of information about Vancouver and its history, both the kind of knowledge we learn from books and the kind we gather through experience (in your case, often from walking through the city). Could you talk a little about how those two types of learning informed or fueled one another? Does one usually come first (a fact altering how you navigate the world; a lived experience motivating research)?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> An interesting question. Walking around what we now call False Creek led to studying old maps, reading books and online articles, going to the Beattie Biodiversity Museum, other museums, libraries, galleries. I awakened, through these experiences, to the fact that I’d grown up here not knowing, grasping, or taking to heart the ongoing violence of colonial abuse. This led me to the Decolonial Aesthetics course at ECUA+D. It was mind-opening. Reading and listening and thinking about all this happened as slowly and incrementally as walking around False Creek and composing the poems. Book learning and walking the seawall and the poems inhabited me and informed one another.</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> </div><div>This kind of information has helped to ground me, to stand me on something closer to a more accurate understanding of what I’m doing, where I am, what I’m part of, and how I might improve the situation. Learning what I can with the resources I can access and am capable of using—curiosity and my love of learning—continue to activate me.</div><div><br /></div><div>I learned on my last trip to India that this is a privilege. Even in my financially difficult years, I was the lucky woman: happy and safe enough to be curious about things not related to securing my basic needs. Highly intelligent people who lack food, water, shelter, or safety, focus their attention on survival. My curiosity is a luxury. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> That’s an important point—how fortunate we are when we have the time and ability to indulge our curiosity. In <i>Open Every Window</i>, you write about an earthquake in 1946, when you were three-and-a-half, which spurred your interest in the earth and stars: "My father moved an orange around a grapefruit on the table to explain how the earth circled the sun. My mother got a book from the library with pictures of volcanoes." Bless your parents! In some ways it feels like they planted the seeds of this new book that day in 1946. Do you see a straight, or crooked, path between that event and this book? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> It’s a continuous path, but wending. A climb. Switchbacks. Tricky rock ledges. Long days wandering in forests, trudging beaches.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> When did poetry become a part of that wending?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> It’s hard to say. I loved and memorized nursery rhymes. My mother read my brother and me poems from an anthology called <i>Silver Pennies</i>. I remember her reading one of my favourite poems from it (“<a href="https://singbookswithemily.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/moons-the-north-winds-cooky-sbwe-song-sheet-no-chords.pdf">The Moon’s the North Wind’s Cookie</a>”) at lunch while we were sucking up canned spaghetti, both of us taking turns choosing poems to hear and urging her to read more. By the time I was six, the children’s librarian told my mother I’d checked out (and read) more books than any other child user of the Vancouver Public Library. That was the old Carnegie library downtown at Main and Hastings.</div><div><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></div><div>My first memory: waking up from a nap in my cot with sun baking my belly and hearing my mother talking with a friend around the corner in the living room. I realized that I was awake and my mother did not know. I understood then that we were not the same person, and that I had to cry if I wanted her to know I was awake. I remember choosing to not cry. Lying there, magnificently bathed in warm late afternoon sunlight coming in through the kitchen windows. It had to be winter in my first year of life because we moved out of that house before I turned one. I think it was before I could sit up or roll over because I wasn’t thinking about moving myself.</div><div> </div><div>Talking, and then writing, were ways I could attempt to give my experiences to someone else. Words were more effective than crying, and they interested me. Plus, poems were words that could dance. I liked to dance. My mother saved a poem I composed and printed out in a little notebook when I was five. She carried it around in her purse. I think of it as my first poem.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>In your memoir you describe how in your childhood you were allowed to "disappear" for the day to "explore the North Shore from ski cabins to the ocean." In some ways, <i>False Creek</i>'s poems drawn from your walks around the city feel like a return to your roots. Though there are of course major differences between 1950s North Shore and 2020s downtown, do you see parallels between these two places? Between the two people who explored them?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> I still love to “disappear” and “explore” the world around me, off on my own without an agenda, free to attend to whatever interests me for as long or as short a time as feels right to me for that exploration. My parents assumed – early on – that I could look after myself wherever I might be. My father gave me instructions in bushcraft: choose your way down when you’re going up; if you’re lost, follow water. My mother made sure I knew which buses to take and where they stopped. </div><div><br /></div><div>My wandering and exploring as a child in North Vancouver was in places where I would rarely meet other people. Walking in the city, I’m almost always around people, watching and listening to them, learning in that way more about where I live and with whom I share life. That child had an innate sense of being able to cope—of trusting herself wherever she was. I think I still do trust that I can cope.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In <i>False Creek</i> you write of breaking your foot and despite this still walking around False Creek in a walking boot (through Leg-in-Boot Square, no less!). Did that shift in your walking rhythm affect the nature or volume of your writing?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> My writing mind dwells in my body and arises as surprises from an unconscious—often actually dreaming—mind. The words come through me. The gestation period of revising and finishing writing is held in me but it starts as a mysterious gift.</div><div><br /></div><div>Walking daily refreshes my mind, stocks my body with details and experiences, feeds my creativity. I give myself over to whatever is there. I’m curious, relaxed, active, trusting. Walking in a boot was sometimes clumsier than walking without a boot, but I adapted. It gave different imagery, new happenstance, more learning. How slowly, incrementally, bone heals and we repair our bodies. So, you can’t rush it. You can’t rush reconciliation. Step by step, day by day, a little by a little, we can heal. That’s what bodies can do. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Vancouver's neighbourhoods have been the subject of a surprising number of poetry books: George Bowering's <i>Kerrisdale Elegies</i>, Daphne Marlatt's <i>Steveston</i>, Michael Turner's <i>Kingsway</i>, and Bren Simmers' <i>Hastings-Sunrise</i> all spring to mind (and those are just books which, like yours, have neighbourhoods in their titles!). Did particular books on the city inspire or inform you in writing your own?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> I’ve loved Daphne Marlatt’s <i>Steveston</i> ever since she wrote it and, yes, it no doubt influenced False Creek, at least obliquely. Her poems flow across the page, influenced more than mine by the poetics of field composition articulated and practiced by Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. The deep, wide flow of her poems embodies the Fraser River at its mouth, meeting ocean and its tides—a confluence shaping Steveston. False Creek is not a river – not even a creek – it’s an inlet of ocean in the heart of Vancouver. It’s tidal. My poems, like Daphne’s, are shaped by breath, but my lines are shorter. The music is different. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixirRudIW2D1yZVwjEWpk2fp15NvOShOM3oYX3AVbpXcnUMCne9TJC5KlGraiN7K5m-8QFMmE_0NHIkhH179Q6T-fF1P_jjlDIKJiQg3UsdbwVbhRU3Gc9fpkDUPUXTIWcQNYGN_jHuTU9VerMdts0F-V06sowdrrnzwHpo1s4KhOqj2C4t9Km/s400/munro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="274" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixirRudIW2D1yZVwjEWpk2fp15NvOShOM3oYX3AVbpXcnUMCne9TJC5KlGraiN7K5m-8QFMmE_0NHIkhH179Q6T-fF1P_jjlDIKJiQg3UsdbwVbhRU3Gc9fpkDUPUXTIWcQNYGN_jHuTU9VerMdts0F-V06sowdrrnzwHpo1s4KhOqj2C4t9Km/s320/munro.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>RT:</b> In <i>Open Every Window</i>, and also in your 2020 collection <i><a href="https://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/glass-float-by-jane-munro/">Glass Float</a></i>, you write extensively about the vital role yoga has played in your life, providing a place of centering, rest and rejuvenation. By comparison, the importance of writing and reading in your life is less emphasised. Did you make a conscious choice to downplay the role of writing in the memoir? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> It felt self-conscious to address, when writing, how central writing is to me, and how my practice as a writer has evolved. Perhaps I have a similar reticence about yoga; I’ve never wanted to become a yoga teacher. But I have written about yoga.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Do the two practices—yoga and writing—affect your life in similar ways, or do you find they work quite differently?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> BKS Iyengar said he wanted to bring intelligence to every cell of his body in his yoga practice. This parallels my writing practice where I want to bring intelligence to each element of my writing: each word, phrase, punctuation, space, each image, each thought. I want to unite them (another yoga principle) and make them intelligible. I think of Patanjali’s yoga sutra 2:46 <i>sthira sukham asanam</i> (“Asana is perfect firmness of body, steadiness of intelligence and benevolence of spirit”) and want my writing to be like that: the flow of it as keenly surprising and engaging as the flow of a good yoga practice. </div><div><br /></div><div>I might not do a daily yoga practice if I didn’t need it to keep me pain-free and calm enough to do the writing. Writing takes me a long time so I need stamina and patience. Both writing and yoga build on layers of insights and clarities from the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. They both engage my whole body—my full self. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> You've been a member of the writing collective <a href="http://yokosdogs.com/">Yoko's Dogs</a> for many years, writing the Japanese collaborative poetic form renga with poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele and Susan Gillis. Often enough in reading <i>False Creek</i>, poems opened in a way that felt similar to the hokku opening of a renga (the "hokku," separated from its longer poem, being what we now call a haiku). One such example, the poem "Moving Water Does Not Hold," opens "the leaf it carries / moon / now gibbous." How has your work with Yoko's Dogs and renga shaped how you think about a poem, both its nature and the nature of its composition?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> One of the first and fiercest things working with Yoko’s Dogs taught me is that just because something seems clear to me does not mean it’s clear to another reader. Our collaborative practice has motivated me to strive for clarity. Yoko’s Dogs has led me to appreciate what I think of as “the naked image.” Renga and haiku do not employ metaphor or narrative and use few modifiers. Matsuo Bashō said the bones of haiku are plainness and oddness. At least, that’s the usual translation of what he said. I’ve learned how incredibly challenging it is to create poems that are plain (clear to the reader) and odd (memorable, resonant, fresh).</div><div><br /></div><div>I’ve come to see poetry as architecture for the imagination. My job as poet is to create space for the reader’s imagination—a habitable apartment they can furnish with memories, thoughts, and feelings. Ideally, my poem will invite them to refresh their habitual relationships to stuff they carry around. And hopefully it will stay standing long enough to serve other readers as well.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Speaking of Bashō, in the very moving closing poem of <i>Blue Sonoma</i> you draw a comparison between your parting from your husband Bob and Bashō's parting from his traveling companion, Sora, on his famous journey in <i>Narrow Road to the Interior</i>. Sora was forced to abandon the trip due to illness. Of their parting, Bashō wrote, "He carries his pain as he goes, leaving me empty. Like paired geese parting in the clouds." </div><div><br /></div><div>Bob wasn't only your life partner, but also your writing companion (you thank his "fine editorial eye and faith in my writing" in the acknowledgments of <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/118634/point-no-point-by-jane-munro/9780771066788">Point No Point</a></i>). The effect of losing Bob from your life is well documented in Open Every Window, but how did losing that editorial eye, and that faith, affect your writing? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> Thank you for that quote from Bashō. I’m missing Bob’s editorial eye now since I am wrestling with a novel. He edited and published many novels. He read. And read. With intelligence, passion, compassion. I might ask him for feedback on something I was struggling with or discuss what I was dithering over, but mostly he read what got published. I rarely shared drafts with him, at least not until I was ready to send it out.</div><div><br /></div><div>As Alzheimer’s destroyed Bob’s capacities, more and more of the tasks of domestic life fell to me as well as earning income, commuting, and caregiving for him as his health declined. He wanted me to be around more, had difficulty understanding, and hated being dependent. </div><div><br /></div><div>There is a draining of the body when a lover goes and will not be replaced. I am hugely grateful for the fullness of life I have been given. But now solitude is to my soul what food is to my body. I feel a profound need, and gratitude, for the solitude that has come lately into my life, giving me time and space to write. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Two writers who played prominent roles in helping you develop this book—one as an early reader, the other as your editor—are Roo Borson and Jan Zwicky. If only every poet could be so lucky! Could you talk a little about how each of these poets has influenced your writing life over the years? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> Impossible to count the ways! I feel extremely lucky. </div><div><br /></div><div>Roo and I met in George McWhirter’s graduate student poetry workshop at UBC fifty years ago. That’s where Roo and Kim Maltman met, too. I had three small children, mothering full-tilt—faculty wife with a home in West Van. I wanted to write and was juggling it all. I liked Roo immediately, but I wasn’t sure how she felt about older-and-more-tied-down me. One afternoon, I summoned my courage and asked her formally if she would be my friend. Annie, my then two-year old youngest child was with us. To my delight, Roo said yes and we’ve been close ever since. </div><div><br /></div><div>Jan arrived in my life as the editor, at Brick Books, for <i><a href="https://www.brickbooks.ca/shop/grief-notes-animal-dreams-by-jane-munro/">Grief Notes & Animal Dreams</a></i>. Doing that editing involved considerable back and forth, mostly by email. Then Jan and Don McKay moved to Victoria and they both became my close friends. I wanted Jan to edit False Creek when Harbour accepted it because I knew she would rigorously challenge my thinking and be acutely sensitive to the political aspects of those poems. </div><div><br /></div><div>I trust both Roo and Jan to be honest and straight-forward with me. They take my concerns seriously, respect my feelings, and trust me to do the same for them. They’re both highly intelligent, wonderful poets, and long-time close friends. We’ve seen one another through thick and thin over many years. I am enormously grateful for the gift of these friendships.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> People might wonder how you wrote so much during the difficult years of your husband's Alzheimer’s. My sense is part of the answer might lie in the consistency of some elements of your writing practice: your regular return to a writing retreat at St. Peter's Abbey, your long-term writing and editorial relationships with Yoko's Dogs, Borson, Zwicky, etc. All these things feel like steadying forces in a turbulent time in your life. Do you see them as such? What has that consistency allowed you to do that might not have otherwise been possible?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> You are right. There has been consistency: Yoko’s Dogs, close friendships with other writers, twenty-five years of writing retreats at St. Peter’s Abbey, other writing or yoga retreats, supportive friends and family, a daily yoga practice. But I think the unspoken and essential thing is that I feel most fully myself when writing. I desperately needed to write in those difficult years. </div><div><br /></div><div>I went out of my way to look after myself. I can’t sing worth beans, but I took singing lessons and maintained a daily singing practice through some of the hardest years. It opened my chest, freed my voice, lifted my spirits. Served as a kind of meditation. I found an Alexander Technique practitioner and went to her for weekly massage treatments. I needed hands-on touch for stress relief. My “old ladies” group met once a month in one another’s homes to discuss a chosen topic. We spoke freely about things not talked about in most polite conversations. I was a subject in a study of Alzheimer’s spousal caregivers done by a psychologist at UVic. She was very worried about my level of acute grief but said I could give classes on how to look after yourself when caregiving. </div><div><br /></div><div>My hard-won, hard-built, yoga practice taught me to value and work with a practice. That has allowed me to make routine my crutch. I keep daily to-do lists, record how I spend my time, am obsessive about getting steps, tracking dreams, drafting proto-poems, working on whatever writing projects I have going, keeping up with yoga, correspondence, deskwork, chores, and whatever else needs doing. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In False Creek you avoid using both punctuation and capitalization, which well-compliments the poems' unvarnished nature. Your previous books have also channeled particular forms, such as <i>Glass Float</i>'s prose poems or <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Active-Pass-Jane-Munro/dp/1897141386">Active Pass</a></i>’ sonnets—forms you've rarely used outside those books. At what point in the creative process do you consider the form of your poems in a given book? Is the form part of the initial creative impulse, or do you find your way to it later, when you have a better sense of the nature of the content?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> I listen. As the words come, their music is shapely. Olson’s dictum, Form = Content, makes total sense to me. The sonnets in Active Pass respond to Mary Pratt’s formal paintings. And to the inner arguments of their content. The presence of conflict in its apparent absence. There’s a contradiction in a sonnet—it shows you its other side. The prose poems in <i>Glass Float</i> are little poetic narratives. And <i>False Creek</i>’s tidal music ebbs and flows. It’s changing. I listen to each poem and it tells me how to punctuate and shape it: where the breaks come, what its pattern is. This does evolve. As the poem comes clear, I’ll get a stronger feel for what it’s saying, what it is—its form and its content. </div><div><br /></div><div>That said, sometimes I’ve gotten interested in a form for how it shapes content. Renga do that. So do ghazals and sonnets. Working within limits hones imagination. A fabric artist I knew who made monumental sculptures told me he had a rule that he could never sew anything together. All his work, which had intersecting panels angled out, had to be something he could weave on a loom. He said, he needed that limitation to spur his imagination.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> As mentioned, <i>Glass Float</i> is composed almost entirely of prose poems, but the final ten poems are written in the style you employ in False Creek: short-lined, multi-stanza poems without capitalization or punctuation. I find there's often a poem or two in one book of mine, written near the end of its composition, which hint at what's to come: a testing out of a form before I fully dive in. Is that the case here? In that sense, do you think of your books as discrete entities, or as a long overlapping sequence?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> Both. I deliberately shape a book, not only for links in content and between adjacent poems, but also for the overall shape and dramatic arc of the book. I think of the book as a poem. But I’m also thinking about the sequence. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Grief Notes and Animal Dreams</i> has a lot of poems about my mother whose death in a house fire was central to that book. <i>Point No Point</i> focuses on my father, who, as it happened, died seven years to the day and hour after the house fire. <i>Active Pass</i> is more about my life, work, commuting, menopause, meditation—a lot of stuff but not specifically about my parents. Then <i>Blue Sonoma</i> returns to the theme of grief—in this case, caregiving for Bob as his Alzheimer’s Disease and other health problems relentlessly erased his well-being and memory. After his death and the Griffin Prize win for <i>Blue Sonoma</i>, I found it difficult to write poetry and turned to prose. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Open Every Window</i> took many years to complete, but it was in that period after I’d left Point No Point and moved back to Vancouver that it became my top writing priority. <i>Glass Float</i>’s prose poems, which I was also working on in those years, may be partly reflective of my immersion in the rhythms of prose. But <i>Glass Float</i>’s focus on yoga, retreats in India and in other parts of the world—which had been consistent parts of my life and of significance to my writing—makes it another discrete work that is part of the continuum. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Is there a hint, then, hidden away in the poems in <i>False Creek</i>, of what might come next? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>JM:</b> Yes, funny you should ask. The poem “The Tongue, the Penis, the Brain” in False Creek is an unintentional direct hint at the novel I’m working on. Whether or not it comes next is an open question. I must finish it for starters, and then it has to find a publisher, and become a book. The whole poem could be seen as a hint but the ending is most directly: </div><div><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div>in your hands, the weight of bone</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>what is left of a father</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>when you wash his armature </div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div>where to inter love</div></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><div><br /></div></div><div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/2023/04/04/choosing-to-not-cry-an-interview-with-jane-munro/">Jane Munro</a> is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. <i>Blue Sonoma</i> (Brick Books, 2014) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Munro’s recent books include <i>Open Every Window: A Memoir</i> (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021) and the poetry collection <i>Glass Float</i> (Brick Books, 2020). She has taught creative writing at universities across BC, led writing workshops, and has given readings around the world. She lives in Vancouver, BC.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-36906256314169018692023-11-28T09:00:00.001-08:002023-11-28T17:14:37.651-08:00Uncooperative with the Expected: An Interview with Dale Tracy<p><em>The following interview is part three of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><b>Learning to Feel Full<br /></b><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote>I pluck petals with a dirty garden glove.<br />That daisy’s stained like newsprint—<br />who reads daisies anymore?<br />Still, the mouth, yellow, opens, and not to say<br />“I love you.”<br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote>Still, when I drink my teeth get wet.<br />My eyes gape, and light gets in.<br />Don’t they get emptier when the pupils grow?<br />I’m full of resources, and places to put them.<br />That doesn’t mean I know when I feel full.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://www.anvilpress.com/books/derelict-bicycles">Derelict Bicycles</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Anvil Press, 2022)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhET1xZvh7Me7CvDXKqM5IUE5IFBOBzVlnkxjRLMttoY1EZQTDtkrymI7BUikZwb1WgoGKzj4ynJ3Y3J8998dgwD0YnhI_c6eO-epeSt3t88s6Q-MU0uDhILNxRv_qBs8vPj5C-P9Co3uJPG-1DKP7FTht7zr_YiY5uk1J2P_uxeTVmorvb4cqK/s1200/NPM-2023-Dale-Tracy.jpg.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhET1xZvh7Me7CvDXKqM5IUE5IFBOBzVlnkxjRLMttoY1EZQTDtkrymI7BUikZwb1WgoGKzj4ynJ3Y3J8998dgwD0YnhI_c6eO-epeSt3t88s6Q-MU0uDhILNxRv_qBs8vPj5C-P9Co3uJPG-1DKP7FTht7zr_YiY5uk1J2P_uxeTVmorvb4cqK/w400-h210/NPM-2023-Dale-Tracy.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> There are a lot of mouths and teeth in <i><a href="https://www.anvilpress.com/books/derelict-bicycles">Derelict Bicycles</a></i>: human and animal; open, devouring, singing, speaking, silent. What draws you to images and metaphors around the mouth? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Dale Tracy:</b> Mouths get my attention because they are inside/outside things. Mouths are the inside of us, but they open: we can look right into them. These are points of inordinate access, right on our faces. The fact of a mouth can become fascinatingly unreal, even unsettling, if I keep perversely pushing the thought. I surprise myself in poems frequently because I write something that upsets me—not because it threatens harm but because it opens up some strangeness of existence that I maybe am not really comfortable with. These mischievous thoughts are probably at the heart of my poetry. Well, maybe they are the mouths of my poems.</div><div><br /></div><div>What we say comes out of the mouth, which is relevant for poetry. But teeth also bring the world into us, as we keep making ourselves. Having multi-purpose body parts is such a strange efficiency. Bringing in the material to keep building our bodies has nothing to do with communication, but they cross each other in the hallway all day long.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>In channeling “the strangeness of existence,” your poems often lean towards the surreal. I was happy to see you'd worked with Stuart Ross, who's kept the flame of surreal poetry going in this country at times when it otherwise might have been snuffed out. What draws you to this type of writing? Have you always written with a surreal bent? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> Yes, thank goodness for Stuart Ross! My poems often start with something I think or say in the course of my everyday life: the surreal bent is how I think in general, so it is also how I think in poetry. The ways that my thinking is strange matches some of what readers expect from poetry, so poetry lets me explore and communicate my reactions, feelings, ideas, and values most clearly.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> I believe poetry is the closest mirror we have to how human beings actually think (not how we like to believe we think, which is far more orderly). I love your awareness, and embrace, of poetry as a path to clarity!</div><div><br /></div><div>You mention in your acknowledgments that your time in Northwestern Ontario and Kingston informed the poems in<i> Derelict Bicycles</i>. How do you think the book would be different if you'd written it elsewhere? Now that you're here in BC, teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, can you sense your poems changing in any way?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> It’s me who would be different: wherever I write now, I’ll always have come from those places. Not so many people are from Northwestern Ontario (it’s not a populous region), so I have a perspective shaped by that—the experiences I had there are not the experiences of most people I meet. Kingston is lively with poetry and arts, and I might not be publishing poetry now if I hadn’t had the opportunity to be connected in poetry community. When I moved to B.C., the trees changed my poems—right away the whole atmosphere of my life (the air’s smell and the whole mood) was different.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> One part of the Kingston poetry scene that made a mark in Derelict Bicycles was the m society, "a mysterious group of writers in Kingston," who provided writing prompts that inspired some of your poems. How have prompts helped you in your writing? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT: </b>What’s better than something making an opening into the world to follow? I already know the things I know, so it’s boring to think those thoughts. A prompt makes me know again what I know, or reflect on it, or learn something new, or think differently. Whether formally or informally, I’m using prompts all the time—that is, I’m looking for something to prompt me. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> I imagine it must be tricky to move between teaching and academic writing, and your own creative work—do prompts help you make that transition? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> My teaching, academic writing, and creative writing all send prompts to each other, so I would probably find it trickier to write in only one way.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In addition to their embrace of the surreal, the poems in <i>Derelict Bicycles</i> cut against popular trends by rarely being explicitly autobiographical: if we see the poet's life in these poems, it's indirectly. In one you write "Of my ornaments, I can only tell, now show... I'm all style where no one sees," and in another, "I won't look for your life / in your poems, / but can I look for mine?" </div><div><br /></div><div>In your monograph, <i><a href="https://www.mqup.ca/with-the-witnesses-products-9780773550285.php">With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion and Claimed Experience</a></i>, you write "I am concerned that an understanding of a poet's corpus does not take the place of hearing what a particular poem has to say." Is there a connection here, between your concern for biography obscuring the poem, and what of you you choose to put on (or withhold from) the page? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> I think “indirectly” is the key. These poems are my most intimate thoughts, the clearest expression of how my mind works. But I’m choosing to explore my thinking through poetry. In a poem, whatever else I’m doing, I’m also exploring how a poem in particular allows me to understand myself and my connections to the world. Each poem is about what that poem that I am thinking in is like. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, my poems are autobiographical, in my own way. The “I” is always a version of me. They are also always self-referential, about who the poem is. </div><div><br /></div><div>How the life connects to the poem constitutes a main interest for me. I teach life writing at KPU. I teach poems in this course, and I teach them the same way as I do in other courses. I want to see the sets of relationships a poem works through, using what I know about a life or the world, but not in such a way that I can only see what I already know.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Connected to this, in <i>With the Witnesses</i> you write "Meeting a poem halfway means reading it as a poem (responding to its imaginative strategies) rather than as something else (a straightforward historical document)." Similarly, you critique readers who "position a poem as direct evidence of a trauma it holds and passes on," and encourage them to read "poem as poem rather than indexical sign of suffering." This problem is particularly prevalent in some English classrooms, where a poem's secret information must be unlocked by solving the puzzle of a poem. As an English professor, I'm curious how you get around this problem in your own classroom. How can you get students to think of a poem as a poem and not a vacuum-sealed set of facts?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> I follow what the poem does and show students how to do the same. I teach a first-year writing course that teaches students about how to communicate, and I think this helps me teach poems in my literature courses: understanding conventions—knowable moves that carry expectations—is helpful with poems to remind us that someone wrote them to communicate something, and wrote them as poems out of an interest in that particular set of available conventions.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In considering "affective and attentive reading methods" for the poetry of others, I assume you must also think about how you'd like readers to approach your own poetry. Do you have an ideal way in which you'd like someone to read your poems? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> Outside of poetry, I worry a lot about misunderstandings and about misrepresenting myself. But communicating with poetry circumvents those worries. There’s always more meaning in art than any one person can arrive at, so I have no impulse for readers that would get in their minds exactly what I have in mine. </div><div><br /></div><div>In general, I hope that readers will think with poems instead of using them to achieve or prove a predetermined result for themselves, but that’s more a sentiment about curiosity, openness, and learning than it is about poetry specifically. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Before we close, I’d like to talk about a favourite poem of mine from <i>Derelict Bicycles</i>, "<a href="https://www.kfpl.ca/programs-and-events/the-poetry-blackboard/2020/11/02/a-weird-part-of-whatever-with-alphild-yuill">A Weird Part of Whatever</a>." There are so many poems out there written about COVID-19, but few I enjoy. This is one I keep thinking about, especially that closing line, "A curtain has been pulled, but I can’t see the curtain." And its mode of composition is as interesting as the content! </div><div><br /></div><div>Could you talk a little about how you wrote this poem? Are there ways in which your approach to this poem was different from others in the book? Ways in which it was the same?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DT:</b> It makes me happy for this poem to be most noticed—it’s so in line with my delight in a kind of uncooperativeness with the expected. Since I noted down verbatim what my grandma said to me on the phone about her experience of the pandemic in her retirement home, all I did was choose and order sentences and call it a poem.</div><div><br /></div><div>And this poem is meaningful to me since it shares my grandma’s thoughts and records some of our conversation. Since it is consistent with the whole collection—in tone, mood, ideas, diction—it makes me think that I’ve inherited ways of thinking from my grandma. I want this poem to keep prompting me when I write poetry, but especially as I do academic writing, through which the inheritances I have are more difficult for me to access.</div><div><br /></div><div>So my approach to this poem was unlike my usual approach except in a more foundational way: I heard the poem in a spontaneous grappling with living out a situation, the same as I hear the poem in my own thoughts sometimes. </div><div><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.anvilpress.com/authors/dale-tracy">Dale Tracy</a> is the author of the chapbooks <i>The Mystery of Ornament</i> (above/ground press, 2020) and <i>Celebration Machine</i> (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the chappoem <i>What It Satisfies</i> (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph <i>With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience</i> (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in <i>filling Station, Touch the Donkey,</i> and <i>The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada</i>, among others. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. <i>Derelict Bicycles</i> is her first full-length poetry collection.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-16417053260853060912023-11-21T09:00:00.000-08:002023-11-21T18:40:43.099-08:00The Poem's Hum: An Interview with Roger Farr<p><em>The following interview is part two of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>Ballad of the Pea and the Shell</b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><i>Le Testament (67-69)</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><br /></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">Once deceived, I came to see how one</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">object may be exchanged for <i>another</i> –</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a<i> gong goozler</i> for a <i>digit</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">an <i>email</i> for a <i>bum itch</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>Kriegspiel</i> for a <i>sailor</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>foot long</i> for a <i>banana stick</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">– & how cheats use slights & devices</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to swap <i>verse</i> & <i>vice versa</i> –</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>shanker</i> for a <i>charnel house</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>deck of cards</i> for a <i>dolly spot</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>tavern </i>for a <i>Tappecoue</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">a <i>sticky bag</i> for a <i>skeleton</i></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">– which is how <i>Love</i> deceives & leaves</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">us banging on the <i>Prison House</i> door.</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=1554201877">After Villon</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(New Star Books, 2022)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3faWeEsVgJk-Skvccrp1zrVVeRheL0Pie63LPYi5j8EpzOSRnZYzqZ_70acFRLsLHvKdC2MDprx681Of0YUHTabYEFOndTTM5EoQzbDzbQZ8CCheP37qXOQeLmP2Vi-wGcDISGwbP-3uxebE-Kh1OrJYCVP6vahEFJ0ucXvSFT8NpjHmUI3zt/s1200/NPM-2023-Facebook.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3faWeEsVgJk-Skvccrp1zrVVeRheL0Pie63LPYi5j8EpzOSRnZYzqZ_70acFRLsLHvKdC2MDprx681Of0YUHTabYEFOndTTM5EoQzbDzbQZ8CCheP37qXOQeLmP2Vi-wGcDISGwbP-3uxebE-Kh1OrJYCVP6vahEFJ0ucXvSFT8NpjHmUI3zt/w400-h210/NPM-2023-Facebook.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> François Villon was, to say the least, a character. A criminal and cheat, both his poems and life story are filled with misdirection, subterfuge and gaps. In the acknowledgments to <i><a href="https://www.newstarbooks.com/book.php?book_id=1554201877">After Villon</a></i>, you write that you began translating Villon shortly after first encountering his work in 2009. What was it about Villon that drew you in so quickly and so fully?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Roger Farr: </b>It was precisely those things you mention. That and the fact that Villon, a medieval poet, was the first to erase the separation between his art and his life, which arguably makes him the first avant-garde writer. But for some time before I read Villon, I had been interested in political and aesthetic discussions about visibility, readability, and clandestinity, topics I wrote about for anarchist publications. When I was working on <a href="https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/375-spring-2007/the-strategy-of-concealment/">a piece for <i>Fifth Estate</i></a> about the work of the Situationist Alice Becker-Ho, who introduced me to Villon, I learned about his poetic use of coded language, deceit, and slang, and I became deeply intrigued. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Villon’s influence on <i>After Villon</i> is obvious, but as I read your book I started to think of the title as being composed of two parts, with the "After" actually pointing to Jack Spicer, whose <i><a href="https://www.nyrb.com/products/after-lorca?variant=35510491054248">After Lorca</a></i>—with its loose translations and "correspondences" from Spicer to Lorca—served as a template of sorts for your book. Did you ever feel tension in trying to honour all three "contributors" (Villon, Spicer, you) in one book? If so, how did you manage that?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> As soon as I started to see my accumulating translations as a book, I knew I would use <i>After Lorca</i> as a template. I have always found Spicer’s poetics difficult to comprehend, which is no doubt part of my attraction to his work. But I thought the correspondences he writes to Lorca were a brilliant way to elaborate a poetics of translation without resorting to overly expository prose. So he was mostly a formal influence, at the level of the book. Ultimately, my eyes and ears were always attuned to Villon.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In your first “correspondence” with Villon, you note that you "cheat" in your translations, in part in honour of Villon's own manipulations of the truth. One such "cheat" involves frequently zipping Villon from the French middle ages to 21st century coastal British Columbia (one poem opens with biographical details of Villon's life and closes with mentions of "homeslices," "toonies," and Abbostford's Matsqui prison). </div><div><br /></div><div>The book opens with an epigraph from <i>After Lorca</i>, "Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it," which seems to be speaking, at least in part, to this maneuvering. Could you talk about the Spicer quote and your choice to lead Villon “across time”? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Spicer’s idea of words as objects points to the materiality of language. When I was translating Villon, I experienced this materiality as a profound opacity and “thickness.” Villon was, of course, writing in Middle French, which, like Middle English, I have no grasp of whatsoever. To make matters worse, it’s not always clear when he is using a coded language designed specifically to shut out police and other “hostile informants.” For example, every word attached to the concept of “marriage” potentially refers to being executed: a “bridegroom” is someone who is going to be hanged (this particular example resonated for me on a number of levels). So when I was “leading the words across time,” I was in many cases trying to translate the opacity, rather than the denotative or even connotative meanings of words as such. An indirect or possible reference to prison, then, might turn up in my poem as “Matsqui.” Instead of trying to “preserve” a literal meaning, I would activate a more recognizable “object”.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Your book's jacket copy notes that your translation "refuses the heteronormative assumptions all too often applied to the "gaps" in meaning of the original texts." Would you consider this another of your "cheats," or a correction of an inaccurate record? Was it something you planned on doing from the beginning of the project, or did it happen more gradually as you worked through the poems line by line? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> I would say “correction of an inaccurate record,” and yes, something that happened gradually. The more deeply I read <i>Le Testament</i>, the more the ambiguities around Villon’s sexuality stared back at me. This was undoubtedly linked to my own life and experiences during the period I was working on the book.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there is also some textual evidence that Villon was queer, or at least “not straight.” Villon’s insinuations that certain police were soliciting young male sex workers, along with his intimate knowledge of where to find them, seemed worth pausing on. There is also what has been called his “trans ventriloquism,” which refers to the manner in which he suddenly speaks as a woman. In one of his most famous Ballads, which I translate—and am quite proud of—he writes from the perspective of an aging female sex worker recalling a bad trick. </div><div><br /></div><div>This fluidity in his work was emphasized by Thierry Martin, who published a remarkable and controversial translation of Villon from Middle to Modern French, called <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/BALLADES-ARGOT-HOMOSEXUEL-FRAN%C3%87OIS-VILLON/dp/2842051920">Ballades en Argot Homosexuel</a></i> (“Ballads in Homosexual Slang”). Martin was working with the three-part “queer code” identified by linguist Pierre Guiraud, which holds that every line in the Ballads in Jargon can be read three ways at once: as a warning not to get caught cheating at cards, as a warning not to get busted by the authorities, and as a warning not be outed as queer. I found this fascinating, and it strongly influenced how I read the poems.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> How did your choice embrace the fluidity in his work change the way you thought about Villon's poetry?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF: </b>There was a distinct shift in my “orientation,” in terms of both language and identity. As Foucault has taught us, the categories of “heterosexual” and “homosexual” didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. Villon’s sexuality was therefore a cipher to me, as opaque as his language. In fact, the entire notion of orientation—especially the idea of a stable identity induced from a sexual inclination defined by the gender of one’s partner(s)—seemed increasingly odd, in literature and in everyday life. Eventually I came to experience poetry and desire on a more somatic level, as forces that work to unbind (to use a term from Freud) identity, language, and “orientation.”</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>How did that shift in orientation shift the translations themselves?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF: </b>While I didn’t follow Guiraud’s and Martin’s approach exactly, my project shared their desire to “make Villon queer again,” if I can put it that way. To accomplish this, I was guided by Marc Démont’s thesis, in his essay “<a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781315505978-12/three-modes-translating-queer-literary-texts-marc-d%C3%A9mont">Three Modes of Translating Queer Literary Texts</a>,” that queer translation “focuses on acknowledging [the original’s] disruptive force and re-creating it in the target language.” This is accomplished by critiquing existing translations, and then developing new linguistic techniques designed “to re-create in the target language the queerness of a text.” The queer translation subverts gender stability and maintains the source text’s “thickness” and opacity, rather than domesticating or normalizing it. That’s what I was after.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Translating poetry from another language is challenging enough, but Villon's work adds the aforementioned challenges of his various “opacities,” most notably his use of thieves' jargon and words of his own devising. Did you find that complicated your work as translator, or did it in some way liberate you, knowing that an "accurate" translation was likely impossible?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Yes and yes! At times I imagined what I was doing as a kind of psychoanalysis—deciphering exquisitely complicated “defense mechanisms” designed to throw me off the case. But the realization that I would never “get it right” was very liberating. I let go of any desire to “master” poetic language a long time ago, and instead learned to enjoy the free play and signification of words. It’s something I notice a lot of my writing students struggle with. For me, difficulty and complexity are an invitation into collaboration and creative problem solving. As a writer I thrive there.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Whenever I read a book in translation, I want to place it beside other translations of the same text to get a sense of this particular translator's style. This was perhaps doubly true of Villon, as the “creative problem solving” involved could take various translators in very different directions.</div><div><br /></div><div>You've generously provided readers with just such a comparison: in "Compario" you present nine translations of a Villon quatrain (including a "Dictation" version, which delightfully translates "Dont maintz marchans furent attains" as "Don't mate Marshawn's friend okay"). Why was it important to you to include that sampling from other translators? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> In “Compario” I wanted to make my methodology visible. This always involved flipping between the original, several dictionaries, and multiple translations into both English and Modern French. When I was really stumped and felt like I was going to fold, I would use dictation software to kind of “blast” something new out of the source text, and then work with that. I refer to this as “bluffing.” It was a lot of fun. I am aware this would be regarded as complete and utter blasphemy for many translators, but I agree with Nathan Brown, who in his introduction to <a href="https://www.anteism.com/shop/flowers-of-evil">his masterful new translation of Baudelaire’s <i>Fleur de Mal</i></a>, suggests that a translator may take creative liberties when confronted with impossibility. Granted, I take more than a few such liberties, which is an index to the degrees of impossibility I encountered. In some cases, I had no choice but to insert poems Villon hadn’t actually written. Lorca accused Spicer of this, too.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Speaking of Spicer, in one of his letters to Lorca he writes that "The perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary." What would you say to that? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF: </b>That’s one of those provocatively cryptic utterances Spicer is so good at. I think he is referring to the poetics of <i>les mots justes</i>, which requires precision and economy in language, plain speech, and a generally minimalist formal aesthetic. I am slanted more towards poetic <i>maximalism</i> these days – excess, clutter, chaos, colour, noise, etc. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>What do you think Villon would have said to Spicer? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Interesting. I’m not sure Villon’s work is compatible with the idea of the “infinitely small.” He wrote in popular forms and was very much a poet of the streets and the taverns, albeit a highly educated one. His language is full of excess: carnivalesque, ironic, idiomatic, mocking, oscillating between high and low genre, etc. It was also, for tactical reasons, lexically dense and expansive. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Let’s add a couple more poets into the discussion: in an essay on <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571222704-orpheus/">his loose translations of Rilke</a>, Don Paterson said, “If we are not prepared to make a choice between honouring the word or the spirit, we are likely to come away with nothing.” </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> I’m not sure I understand what is meant by “spirit” in Paterson’s statement. Is he referring to the aporia between signifier/sound and signified/sense, perhaps? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Yes, I think so. At the level of the word, and also the poem—the spirit of the whole piece.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> It’s a constant question for a translator. In my case, I was confronted with signs (sounds) that had no “sense” or “spirit” or “signification”; or if they did, they were literally being deployed as screens to lead interpreters (translators!) away from their referents.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>When <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/steven-heighton-interview/">I offered the Paterson quote to Steven Heighton</a>, who called his own translations "versions," he replied in a way that suggested a choice between word and spirit might be impossible:</div><div><br /></div></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div><div style="text-align: left;">“In poetry there’s no Cartesian separation of mind and body or content and form... The poem is its music. Poetry is a form of song in which the words are obliged to create their own rhythmic and musical accompaniment. So, as a translator, you have to try to approximate the poem’s rhythms and, if I can put it this way, melodies. And, if the original is rhymed, well, that’s part of its essence and you need to try to reenact it somehow in your translation.”</div></div></div></blockquote><div><div><br /></div><div>I felt in reading your translations, and your correspondences about them to Villon, that you might both agree and disagree with both Heighton and Paterson…</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Yes. I might disagree with Heighton’s idea of rhyme as an “essence.” I think demands of syntax and tone, rhetorical and literary devices, etc. can and should sometimes trump the element of rhyme. We’ve all read translations where fidelity to rhyme leads to some pretty clunky language. But I like what he says about trying to “reenact” it, which perhaps points to some other possibility for how we conceive of rhyme. For me, rhyme is simply the patterns of repetition that hold a poem together; they establish its <i>rhythm</i>. This includes repeated vowel/consonant combinations like “home” and “tome,” of course, but also repeated syntactical constructions: for example, ending each stanza with a question, or uttering a warning every few lines. These are also repeated elements and should “count” as rhyme. </div><div><br /></div><div>In <i>After Villon</i>, I sometimes tried to keep conventional rhyme operating (both end-stopped and internal), and in some places I maintain a “fidelity” to the original poems (despite the consistent mocking of marriage and monogamy). But I was generally more interested in translating things like addressivity, the conspiratorial tone, the pleading for mercy, the warnings, etc. Even where sound and sense are separated, those rhetorical features and the poem’s overall “hum” remain intact. At least that is my hope.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>I love that idea of a poem’s “hum.” I think Heighton and Paterson would like it, too.</div><div><br /></div><div>In After Lorca, Spicer writes "Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry," and it strikes me that exile is a part of both Villon's story (banished from Paris in 1462) and your own, far more voluntary, "exile" from Vancouver to Gabriola Island. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of the bar-hopping social life common to both Spicer and Villon, you write "I am far away from that now & have been for many years." Did you sense a parallel between the change in Villon's life and your own? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> I was part of a rigorous literary bar scene in Vancouver for some time. And I’m not entirely sure if my departing flight from the city in 2004 was with Exile or Banishment. As with Villon’s exit from Paris, I am certain a few people were relieved to see me go. The feeling is mutual. There are some remarkably petty people in the writing scene I once belonged to. I address them in a few places in the book. They seem to find their agency in gossip and rumour. They can be hard to spot, because they only emerge from their holes when there is a little piece of cheese waiting for them. But they know who they are.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Ha! While we know your post-banishment fate, no one knows what happened to Villon—he simply disappeared from history. Were you in some way translating Villon from a place beyond his known history; from that next, quieter, space his life may have entered had he lived long enough?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Rabelais suggests, in an obscure passage in <i>Gargantua and Pantagruel</i>, that a few years after his banishment, Villon emerged in a theatre troupe in a remote village, and lived out his life there quietly and happily. I think that is unlikely, given Villon’s temperament and criminal associations and Rabelais’ tendency to satire and invention. I suspect Villon met his end on the gibbet, in a dungeon, or in a brawl. I hope my fate is more along the lines of what Rabelais imagined.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> Yes, sign up for that theatre troupe, already! On the subject of endings, near the close of the book you write of being done with Villon ("For me you are an ancient city bombed..."). This mirror's Spicer's eventual shrugging off of Lorca. Did you really feel done with him? And did that tiring of him go deeper than normal end-of-book fatigue? </div><div><br /></div><div><b>RF:</b> Mostly that was in keeping with the trajectory of Spicer’s “break up” with Lorca. When the book finally went into production, though, I carefully removed all the translations and dictionaries and critical studies from my desk and put them on a shelf in a bookcase in my bedroom, then replaced them with the books I will be using for my next writing project (a collection of essays and translations on anarchism and sexuality). I worked on my slim book of Villon translations on and off for ten years, so I was glad to move on to something else. That said, Villon haunts everything I write now, and remains my poetic Master.</div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.capilanou.ca/programs--courses/search--select/explore-our-areas-of-study/faculty-profiles/roger-farr/">Roger Farr</a> is the author of five books of poetry: <i>Surplus</i> (2006), <i>Means</i> (2012), <i>IKMQ</i> (2012), a finalist for the BC Book Prize in Poetry in 2013, <i>I Am a City Still But Soon I Shan't Be</i> (2019), and most recently, <i>After Villon</i> (2002). <i>The Amorous Comrade</i>, a collection of essays on anarchism and sexual politics, is forthcoming in 2024.</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-20709328659880892562023-11-14T09:00:00.002-08:002023-11-16T21:38:03.859-08:00Listening For My Breath: An Interview with Délani Valin<p><em>The following interview is part one of <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/npm2023/">a seven-part series of conversations</a> with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. </em><em>All seven interviews were originally posted at <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/">ReadLocalBC.ca</a>. </em><em>This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place <a href="https://www.readlocalbc.ca/tag/rob-taylor/">here</a>).</em></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><i>---</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b>Mrs. Clean</b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><b><br /></b></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">Yes, he cooks! He cleans!</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">He writes grocery lists!</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">But oh, how low</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">the bar is set.</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">I should be lucky,</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">after all most men</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">aren’t used</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">to scrubbing a toilet.</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">My husband’s muscles</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">bulge against the cotton</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">of his skin-tight bleached</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">t-shirt. I’m told he’s ideal</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">in every way. He won’t touch me</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">without wearing his yellow rubber</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">gloves. Yet he plucks hairballs</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">with bare hands from the neighbour’s</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">drain. I’ll spike his club soda</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">with lemon and Clorox. Watch</blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;">his bald ass Magic Erase that.</blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Reprinted with permission from </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/collections/delani-valin/products/9780889714281">Shapeshifters</a></i></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Nightwood Editions, 2022)</span></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx5UYkAjL18nrSosTsseC5EB01_FdqenUlvJPSk04Gq0V0U7kdK7QjnUcS09zfIB4idxIxI25QpevzMPc8ZjQTpl8aLbUETRMSSYx6P9QOw1TuN_1AFb1NwaxDIlryd0N7G1-mr984Odry164nGlpUENGXaT8zMBCsNm5VN3Fy_TW5K6wCA7T4/s923/NPM2023-Delani-Valin.jpg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="923" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx5UYkAjL18nrSosTsseC5EB01_FdqenUlvJPSk04Gq0V0U7kdK7QjnUcS09zfIB4idxIxI25QpevzMPc8ZjQTpl8aLbUETRMSSYx6P9QOw1TuN_1AFb1NwaxDIlryd0N7G1-mr984Odry164nGlpUENGXaT8zMBCsNm5VN3Fy_TW5K6wCA7T4/w400-h225/NPM2023-Delani-Valin.jpg.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div><b>Rob Taylor:</b> The first third of <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/collections/delani-valin/products/9780889714281">Shapeshifters</a></i> is devoted to persona poems, such as “Mrs. Clean.” It’s not until page 32 that we encounter a speaker who resembles some approximation of “Délani Valin.” In your acknowledgments, you thank poet Marilyn Bowering for “suggest[ing], during a time of deep struggle, that I play with different personas as a way to access different experiences.” How did persona poems help you better access the experiences you were struggling with?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Délani Valin:</b> When I came to my writing instructor, Marilyn Bowering, I was in my early twenties and had been writing since I was a child. My problem was that over time, I felt my poetry had become one-dimensional. I was writing the same poem over and over, if I could write at all. In retrospect, I see that I had cornered myself into the narrow identity of Sad Person. I think this was protective: a Sad Person isn’t caught off guard by suffering—she suffers preemptively by numbing out all the time. Yet seeing this numbness reflected back to me again and again in my work didn’t provide me catharsis. I felt alienated from my work and from my body, like I was existing at arm’s length from my own life.</div><div><br /></div><div>Marilyn assured me that my creativity hadn’t dried up, but that perhaps I needed another point of entry. She suggested writing from different perspectives and personas to avoid the trap of circling around the same poem (and pain) over and over. She gifted me Carol Ann Duffy’s <i>The World’s Wife</i>, which was really helpful. Duffy is so witty and I was enamored with the vibrancy in her work.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Why did you choose to focus on corporate mascots?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> I grew up with corporate mascots invading everywhere from my school to my pantry and living room. They’re ubiquitous, and many a marketer has hijacked humanity’s gift for stories and fascination with archetypal characters in order to sell yet another variety of cereal. These corporate archetypes are Heroes and Maidens and Mothers. Yet, they’re devoid of agency. My experiment with them was an empathetic effort to imagine their inner lives distinct from the marketers who breathed them into being. But of course, I only substituted my own breath.</div><div><br /></div><div>Marilyn’s advice about exploring topics through personas brought me closer to myself by opening up a wider breadth of possible expression. After trying on a multitude of masks, I was able to glimpse the grounded wearer at the centre of them all.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT:</b> In a sense, you pass that journey on to your readers: we access the biographical details of the “grounded wearer at the centre” by traveling first through the persona poems. Was it always important for you to put the persona poems at the beginning? What effect do you hope for that to have on your readers?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> This was an area in which Silas White and Emma Skagen at Nightwood Editions were indispensable. When I put together the manuscript, I was unsure about its shape. I thought about putting all of the poems in the exact order I wrote them so that maybe some progression would unfold, but they rattled against each other. I think that it was a case of me being too close to the material to pull back and make sense of it. Once I read it in the order Silas and Emma suggested, it clicked. The shape of the book mirrors the process I had undergone to access my own experiences. It’s like a map.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>The poem “Telogen Effluvium” sits, quite literally, at the centre of your book. Named after a hair-loss condition that can sometimes be triggered by psychological or emotional stress, the poem pushes close to discussing a traumatic event, but stops short. On exactly page 48 of a 96 page book, you write, “We just need to know the whole story. Ok, here it is,” but then the next section of the poem is a recipe for a hair mask, and we never fully circle back (though a poem later in the book fills in some details). The result gives a well-like shape to the book: poems stacked carefully around the edges of a dark centre.</div><div><br /></div><div>I’m always interested in poems where the author is actively wrestling with something on the page (I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Write it!” in “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art">One Art</a>“). On the one hand these moments feel emotionally raw and honest, and on the other of course there is always some level of artifice: the poem, even if written in a moment of intensity, was edited and prepared for publication slowly over many months. Could you talk about “Telogen Effluvium,” both how it came to you and how you positioned it within the book?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> I wrote “Telogen Effluvium” six months after a traumatic event involving a sexual assault while I was visiting Cotonou, Benin in 2018. What’s interesting is that the other poem that deals more directly with the assault, “Magic Lessons,” was actually written while the event was unfolding and in the immediate aftermath.</div><div><br /></div><div>They both deal with the circumstances differently. With “Magic Lessons,” my intention had been to write an extended letter to my partner in the form of a travelogue. (As an aside, Benin is an incredible country to visit.) But hell broke loose for me while I was there, and my poem necessarily took a turn.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I got back from Benin, I was in a bit of a trance and related my story to others many times. I felt this urgency to be seen, to be witnessed. I wanted confirmation that I was still alive and still me. But this also led to me sharing more than was safe for me to do in some cases. Not everyone believed me about what happened, and nor did everyone have the space for my difficult story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Therefore, when I wrote “Telogen Effluvium,” I was curious about how I could share my story while still protecting myself. I had already absorbed most of the truth of my situation, so I wanted to create a controlled experience where I could anticipate judgement, deflect, and pull back. If I circled around the truth enough, would it come through? Would it be more palatable?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>That’s so interesting, that you wrote more directly about the assault initially, but then circled back to a more cautious approach in “Telogen Effluvium.” And then made the choice to present them in the opposite order in the book, like something is being drawn out from you, when really you were reeling it back in. Could you talk a little about the form of “Magic Lessons,” with its six sections, each containing seven tercets, and its many repetitions?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> Because I was writing without the benefit of any temporal distance, I knew it was important that I ground the poem in form so that it wouldn’t spiral into a journal entry. The repeating lines served as an anchor, and finding some kind of “lesson” for each section of the poem was actually a helpful tool for meaning-making when the ground beneath me was crumbling at the time of the writing.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>It’s fascinating how form can drive meaning-making, pushing you to new and necessary places. “Magic Lessons” isn’t alone in doing this: poems in <i>Shapeshifters</i> are striking in their formal rigour. In addition to more traditional forms, such as glosas, haibun, prose poems, and set stanzaic forms, the book includes forms of your own invention.</div><div><br /></div><div>One poem, “The Geologist,” is a formal tour de force: it features italicized lines which both can be read as part of the rest of the poem and as its own standalone poem. And if you pluck out the italicized lines, the remaining poem still works! I’ve never read anything quite like it. Could you talk about your interest in form? Does it function for you in some way like the persona poems, a path to access experiences that otherwise prove elusive?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> I think that’s right—form serves a similar function to the persona poems, in that forms give me a framework that I can explore and subvert. It also helps the writing stay playful for me. If I’m exploring a difficult personal topic, the form becomes a sort of puzzle. I know I have to hit certain lines or conclude a stanza in a specific way, so in a sense there is a right answer to my “poetry riddle.” It creates a bit of safe distance for me while making sure the writing process is fun.</div><div><br /></div><div>I also do this in an attempt to care for the reader. It’s a deeply humbling experience when a reader says they connect with what I’ve written. But if what they’re relating to is a difficult experience or emotion, I want to do my best not to leave us both in that space. Pain is inevitable in life, but as someone who has complex trauma or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), I feel like it’s my responsibility to be mindful about transferring my particular trauma onto anyone else.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some of the ways I try to do this are through form, narrative, strategic avoidance, being disciplined about which details I share, and, in some poems, through directly naming this intention. It’s an aspect of my writing that I want to keep developing.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>What a generous way to consider your readers, and an interesting way to think about form. One formal element you play with a lot, both in “Magic Lessons” and elsewhere, is long lines—so long they spill over to a second line when squeezed onto the printed page. In this they are reminiscent of poets such as Walt Whitman, Jorie Graham, and C. K. Williams. What inspired you to take on the writing of such long lines? How did long lines affect your sense of what you could say in your poems?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> I think the long lines come up for a few reasons. Sometimes it’s to try to capture the way I would tell a story orally—I’m listening for my breaths as I’m writing. Another reason is to give myself space. In conversation with others, it’s often when we stay on one subject just a beat too long that a surprising twist happens. Perhaps we’re discussing something political on a fairly surface level and someone starts to say, “Well, anyway…” but if we stay on the subject just a touch longer, we might discover that they were pivoting because things were actually getting real. It happens to me all the time in conversation, and I try to give a little space for these sorts of insights when I write.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other places, such as “Magic Lessons,” the long lines were an attempt to instill a frantic undercurrent to the poem—though the form is tight, it was a stressful time, so something should reflect that! Beyond that, because the poem deals with magic, the lines are written as a sort of incantation or spell. Ultimately, it’s a spell of self-protection and survival.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>The closing poem in <i>Shapeshifters</i> is a similar type of spell. In it, you have Cinderella write in her diary, “I killed / my first stepmom but you all // have me clap with songbirds / and cry.” To what extent do you see <i>Shapeshifters</i> as a response to the popular narratives around women’s trauma? In what ways were you trying to tell that story differently here?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> The thing about Cinderella is that in some versions of the archetypal story, she does kill her stepmother or even her mother. In others, she flees from advances from her father. Cinderella is afforded more agency in these tales than in most modern retellings.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the same way that I was sick of my repeating Sad Person poems, I think I was tired of a lifetime of hearing sanitized frail damsel stories. I grew up with Disney and the Bible as a kid, and then I came of age during a time when the damsel was replaced by a stoic “tough chick” trope—a plucky girl who could punch her way through any foe. Essentially, both of these tropes can be summed up as Victims or Survivors. But in either case, these identities comprise ways in which we are totally defined by what happened to us. I don’t think either label suits me. I don’t see myself as a victim or as a survivor. A traumatic event that happened to me is just a thread in a much larger tapestry. I’m not that thread, and nor am I the tapestry. I’m the weaver. I think I wanted to speak to different possibilities.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Beautifully put. Another major part of your “tapestry” is your Métis identity. In “No Buffalos,” you write about your mother, who only at age 40 rediscovered your family’s ancestry (her great-uncle Donald Ross was a member of Louis Riel’s Exovedate and was killed on the final day of fighting at Batoche). You note that despite her lineage and commitment to teaching Métis culture and history, she was still questioned for not having “lived Métis experience.” “Who counts and who decides?” you ask near the end of the poem, “We all have stories, we’re all legitimate.” Can you talk a little about your journey to that last statement?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> Being Métis is wonderful. Because of the work my mom does, I’ve been able to embody this truth earlier in life than she had a chance to. She got me involved in jigging when I was a child, and because she became a cultural presenter, I grew up with access to a lot of artifacts and stories.</div><div><br /></div><div>Still, I have struggled with feelings of displacement. My grandmother was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, but my mom was born in Hay River, Northwest Territories. My parents met in Edmonton and then moved to my dad’s birthplace, Québec City, which is where I was born. We moved to B.C. when I was nine. There’s been a pervasive feeling of rootlessness threaded through my life, and part of that had contributed to a sense that perhaps I didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. My family is scattered, and I will always be a guest on Snuneymuxw territory, where I currently reside.</div><div><br /></div><div>I’ve long had the sense that being Métis isn’t a checkbox we tick off, nor does it end with the knowledge of Métis ancestry. Being Métis is an ongoing process: a way of seeing, being, knowing and connecting. Being in relation with other Métis people helped me see this, and made me realize the validity of my own experience. It echoed the experiences of others, and was in some places distinct.</div><div><br /></div><div>When I started to live that from my heart, I stopped wondering whether I was Métis “enough.” I work with what I have, I create and maintain relationships wherever I can, and I endeavour to know more, but not because I’m striving to be anyone’s ideal Métis—whatever that is—but because my heart is calling out for it.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>While you were rooting yourself in your family’s Métis heritage, did a similar process play out for you in literature? While reading Shapeshifters, two other Métis poets kept coming to mind: in your mix of formal considerations and Métis history, your poems reminded me of Marilyn Dumont‘s work (especially poems like her sestina “Fiddle Bids Us”), and in your humour and efforts to reconnect to a broken chain of ancestry, they reminded me of Molly Cross-Blanchard‘s poems, such as “<a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2021/09/exhibitionist-by-molly-cross-blanchard.html">First-Time Smudge</a>.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Those are quite likely just my readerly associations, of course, and you have entirely different ones! “I am also in the broth,” you write in one poem about Métis belonging. Could you talk about the literary broth you see yourself a part of?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> Those are great picks. While writing “No Buffalos,” I still mired in self-doubt and was constantly afraid to offend or to get things wrong. I worried that I had no right to speak on any form of Métis experiences, even though I was exploring my own stories. It helped immeasurably to read Indigenous writers like Marilyn Dumont, Louise Bernice Halfe – Skydancer, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield and Lee Maracle for questions of perspective, form, and language.</div><div><br /></div><div>Writers like Molly Cross-Blanchard, Jónína Kirton, Selina Boan, Jordan Abel and Joshua Whitehead have helped orient me whenever I’ve felt isolated in my explorations. I’m grateful to be able to read so many funny, brilliant, generous, and surprising Indigenous writers. It’s a great time to be reading and writing.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>RT: </b>Keeping with Dumont for a minute, like you she had the experience of discovering in her youth that she was related to a prominent Métis leader (in her case, Gabriel Dumont). She waited until her fourth book, <i>The Pemmican Eaters</i>, published twenty years after her debut, to write in detail about that connection. Of this delay, she wrote that her journey to understanding her family’s past “was a lengthy process of historical enquiry and gradual acceptance,” and that perhaps “loyalty to my mother was part of the reason for not writing about Gabriel Dumont before now.” To what extent does Dumont’s slow journey through divided loyalties resonate with your own experience?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>DV:</b> I actually see this articulation as a kind of foreshadowing for myself. There are bits and pieces of my personal experience and of my family’s histories (on both sides) that I haven’t explored. I feel the histories still unfolding within me in my day-to-day life, and I’m trusting their timing to float up and be written. I think stories have a say in when they want to be told.</div></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">---</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span style="color: #0000ee;"><u>Délani Valin</u></span> is neurodivergent and Métis with Nehiyaw, Saulteaux, French-Canadian, and Czech ancestry. She studies for her master’s in professional communications at Royal Roads University, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University. Her poetry has been awarded <i>The Malahat Review</i>’s Long Poem Prize and <i>subTerrain</i>’s Lush Triumphant Award. She is on the editorial board of <i>Room</i> and <i>The Malahat Review</i>, and lives on traditional and unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC).</div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-53960267184974840902023-08-21T09:00:00.008-07:002023-08-21T09:00:00.142-07:00everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language<p></p><blockquote>When I teach, I often tell my students, "The writing knows more than we do." What I mean is that language is a vast repository, a great archive, a word hoard, a storehouse of accumulated knowledge and experience. Everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language. Or is pointedly, not there. Language can be a <i>Stolperstein</i>, a stumble stone. A marker which remembers, which reminds, which draws your attention to time, place, history, culture, to the world. Just by virtue of being a speaker of the language, you have access to this knowledge. You have access to something much larger, much deeper than just yourself. You're a tree connected to the rest of the forest by its roots. Or maybe you're a leaf on a tree, connected to a trunk, connected to a system of roots, which connect you to the entire forest. And as the song goes, the green grass grows all around and around, the green grass all around. But you can see the forest because you're a tree. You're an antennae upside down in the ground.</blockquote><p>- Gary Barwin, from his essay "Writing as Rhizome: Connecting Poetry and Fiction with Everything" in the <a href="https://tnq.ca/issues/issue-167/">Summer 2023 issue of <i>The New Quarterly</i></a>.</p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-16623541524572897292023-07-31T09:00:00.002-07:002023-08-04T00:11:43.867-07:00On Display in my Mind: An Interview with Nick Thran<p><b></b></p><p> </p><blockquote><p><b>A John Ashbery Remembrance Day</b></p><p>A call came into the shop from someone looking for your Girls on the Run.</p><p>We didn’t have the book.</p><p>Could not have been expected to have the book.</p><p>But I offered to order the hardcover edition, which was still in print,</p><p>also suggested Notes from the Air, </p><p>and one of the Library of America collected volumes</p><p>which would include Girls on the Run in its entirety,</p><p>providing the customer with more of the work for a small mark-up in</p><p>price.</p><p>The t-shirt I was wearing had a crude drawing of your face—a gift that my</p><p>wife had ordered online.</p><p>The poppy on my sweater looked pinned to your hair.</p><p>I didn’t tell the customer I was wearing the shirt.</p><p>Instead I write it here,</p><p>just a little bit high on the feeling of being of use.</p></blockquote><p> </p><p><br /></p><p></p><p style="text-align: right;">from <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9780889714489">If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display</a></i><br />(Nightwood Editions, 2023).<br />Reprinted with permission</p><p style="text-align: center;">---</p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>Nick Thran is the author of three acclaimed collections of poems, including <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/collections/nick-thran/products/9780889712607">Earworm</a></i>, which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. After stops in Toronto, Victoria, New York, Calgary, Madrid and Montreal, Thran now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik, where, in addition to writing, he works as an editor and bookseller. His new collection of essays, stories, and poems, <i><a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/collections/nick-thran/products/9780889714489">If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display</a></i>, was published in Spring 2023 by Nightwood Editions.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4TifVGxKX9rj3i7e-o8JY58Qp19uY8ELhZQKY25kL5FHSPlph9nw_R6wLet1oyaq1STVC5-ow3rnsuRuMHVutzhCzBpnZB3A6N8OdACscWArAfiJ7PxdQxwn8VQ1YtnJXVZyvP9FMZEl68r30vMwgMldiIxOwGTNROy6tw-AzBW84jFh2CFk/s400/Nick%20Thran.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="400" height="366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4TifVGxKX9rj3i7e-o8JY58Qp19uY8ELhZQKY25kL5FHSPlph9nw_R6wLet1oyaq1STVC5-ow3rnsuRuMHVutzhCzBpnZB3A6N8OdACscWArAfiJ7PxdQxwn8VQ1YtnJXVZyvP9FMZEl68r30vMwgMldiIxOwGTNROy6tw-AzBW84jFh2CFk/w400-h366/Nick%20Thran.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">---</p><p><b><br />Rob Taylor:</b> The back jacket copy of <i>If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display</i> bills it as “a volume of essays, stories and poems… on a life of reading, writing and bookselling.” And yet, smack in the middle we find “Collected Trout,” a 24-page essay on Calgary’s <a href="https://www.theoldtrouts.org/">Old Trout Puppet Workshop</a>. Like in a wide-ranging display at a bookstore, your reader is left to make the connections between this disparate part and the others. A few other pieces, too, seem only loosely tethered to the book’s central concerns. </p><p>“I love making the themed / (albeit only broadly associative) tabletop / displays,” you write in an early poem in the book. Later, you refer to this type of curation as “a form of poetry.” Could you talk about your approach to the curation of this book, which ranges so widely in both form and content? </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYKkcAmzkcT4Gyjx3WdLnkSk54TKgxLgApdJ3HyVBJEjOR6ql_Cw0bS6_pf-A7dw02hYm6EBuvCp2DD_UV2u2JiUTTCUrUDhTqQbozXZ5YaANGaikRxL0GB6j9wauS1Sj1REJFuJb7sJWLj-Bwfb2uqLXAm7fYWByYjANk0phNPsfxUFTZRPuB/s1135/If%20It%20Gets%20Quiet.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1135" data-original-width="780" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYKkcAmzkcT4Gyjx3WdLnkSk54TKgxLgApdJ3HyVBJEjOR6ql_Cw0bS6_pf-A7dw02hYm6EBuvCp2DD_UV2u2JiUTTCUrUDhTqQbozXZ5YaANGaikRxL0GB6j9wauS1Sj1REJFuJb7sJWLj-Bwfb2uqLXAm7fYWByYjANk0phNPsfxUFTZRPuB/s320/If%20It%20Gets%20Quiet.jpg" width="220" /></a></div><b>Nick Thran:</b> I find I am focused, energized, and un-self-conscious when I’m gathering books together for display. One afternoon, immersed in this activity, I paused, looked out the window, and thought to myself, this feels so good. Then I began to think about display-making in the context of the writing I’d been doing over the last few years. <p></p><p>After <a href="https://harbourpublishing.com/products/9780889713147"><i>Mayor Snow</i></a>, I wanted to write a book that didn’t rely too heavily on well-paved neural pathways towards anxiety and fear. Those things could be there in the new work, would be there, because that’s a part of my makeup. But the central mode of the new book, whatever it looked like, would be that E.M. Forster quote from <i>Howards End</i> “Only connect!” I also wanted to stay with things longer than I was in a lot of my poems. I liked the challenge of extending looks, in prose, while also accommodating diversions, digressions, associative thought. </p><p>But I’d hit a wall in a book of essays I was working on. The essays I’d already written were interesting to me. A lot of them, “Collected Trout” included, are in this book. But I’d developed an impossible set of constraints for myself. I was also running into that difficulty most every non-fiction writer, writing about the work of others, runs into: am I really the person to be speaking on behalf of some of the artists I’m writing about? Especially if I’m trying to make these essays, in some way, personal? Fiction gave me some freedom from those constraints, to remove the names, to veer off in wildly imaginative or speculative directions, but keep the essence.</p><p><b>RT:</b> What inspired you to pursue fiction as a way to keep the essence of a true story?</p><p><b>NT:</b> Fiction has, since I moved to Fredericton seven years ago, become a real companion. I especially like a lot of the sometimes sprawling, sometimes granular, lyric, multi-book series loosely termed “autofiction”– Knausgaard, Ferrante, Alexis, Bolaño, Cusk. The value of novels and story collections is more apparent to me now than at any point in my life, especially living a bit further away from the urban centres, especially navigating through middle age, especially staying engaged with the world throughout the pandemic. I think as public spaces shrink, and culture sometimes feels more clipped, visual, or algorithm-generated, it makes sense that a lot of readers are drawn to works where people get a chance to go on and on about the full scope their lives and the lives of those around them, whether fictionalized or not. </p><p>One day I was reading this slim novel by Dionne Brand, <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/564847/theory-by-dionne-brand/9780735274259">Theory</a></i>, when it clicked: fiction, that thin film over reality that gives us room to play with the ways that people relate. Then I spent a glorious three months just writing and editing story after story. All six that are in the book. </p><p>In addition to relieving some of the self-made pressure of the essays, including short fiction added another element to the still-flowering idea that I could write a book that is also a display. Imaginary bookstores. Play with gender. Other points of view. </p><p><b>RT:</b> Did you have any similar influences that inspired the essays-that-stayed-essays in the book?</p><p><b>NT:</b> As soon as I decided I wanted the new collection to embody the pleasures and practice of book display-making, I started to think about writing an autobiographical essay about bookselling. I stumbled upon a book of essays by Vivian Gornick called <i><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538255/approachingeyelevel">Approaching Eye Level</a></i>. WOW. I read five more of her books. Three of them, <i>Approaching Eye Level</i>, <i>The Odd Woman and the City</i> and <i>Fierce Attachments</i>, I’ve read at least three times each (they’re short). She reminded me, by the insightful hinges or explosions that seemed to occur from some of the briefest encounters, that there was no such thing as a “boring” subject. That the most niche or particular interest—decorating a window with books, for example—could be interesting if I was writing directly at what made it interesting to me. </p><p>About Vivian Gornick I began to understand what my guitar teacher, Sebastian (who happens to be the teenage son of two friends of mine), means when he talks about his love of Bruce Cockburn: “He plays everything I want to play, exactly the way I want to play it.” Her work taught me how I might transfer some of what I knew worked in a poem into prose, at the sentence, paragraph, and overall structural levels. Many other writers of prose have influenced this book. But I hadn’t felt this mix of affinity for a voice along with a MAJOR CRAFT LESSON since the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa first showed me how to write a poem. </p><p><b>RT:</b> What did Komunyakaa show you? (He asks, as a poet who still has no clue how to write a poem.)</p><p><b>NT:</b> In 1999, the year I got my mitts on his <i><a href="https://www.weslpress.org/9780819512116/neon-vernacular/">Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems</a></i>, I was immediately moved by how the variety of settings in the poems—Louisiana, Vietnam, Harlem, etc.—felt joined in the music of the lines, and in the kinds of details that he brought to the fore (often brief, tender details, like the woman “brushing a boy’s hair” in the black glass of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial). </p><p>I drew from how he experimented with different masks, different voices. I liked his then-burgeoning insistence on drawing lines between the contemporary and the mythical, even when those lines went through inhospitable places, or traumatic experiences. I admired how he wrote, musically, about his love of music. </p><p>At the beginning of my writing life, I thought that poetry was elevated thought, or feelings distilled to inarguable truths. But in Komunyakaa’s poems, such as “The Dog Act,” it seemed like “Contradiction, the old barker / drunk again on these lights / & camaraderie” was the mode. The speakers in his poems seemed to strive for meaning and self-loathe in equal measure (something I could identify with at the time). </p><p>And in terms of a craft lesson, just look, in those quoted lines, at the way “& camaraderie” takes on the properties of the “these lights,” all those “a”s blinking, rhythmically, visually, between the consonants. It’s the kind of intricate wiring that one could work towards learning. You didn’t just have to magically BE some precocious (and probably insufferable) Rimbaudian character. </p><p><b>RT:</b> I love the thought of Brand, Gornick and Komunyakaa all nudging you forward in their various ways, perhaps arguing a bit between one another but ultimately collaborating. When did you decide to bring it all together—stories, essays, poems—in one book? </p><p><b>NT:</b> I had been reading a lot of what you might call “unclassifiable books.” I was interested in work that swerved away from expected narratives, that used collage techniques, mixed fiction with non-fiction, that were hard to catalogue. And I’d always had it in my mind that I’d like to try a book of lyric prose. </p><p>So, finally, I had the drive and the tools. I was writing a book of poems at the time, too. But to be honest, most of the poems I’d been writing—not all, but most—were boring me to tears. Now, poems that I thought were worthwhile began to bubble up from the sludge of my poetry files, and seemed fresher when set next to the prose pieces. The poems had context; they did some things the prose couldn’t do. Putting the book together started to feel like my Sunday afternoon display-making at the store. Metaphors of the forest and the city started to flirt with one another. I was in that good, creative place again, saying the things that I wanted to say, in the ways I wanted to say them. </p><p><b>RT:</b> Thinking of Brand, Gornick and Komunyakaa encouraging you along brings me back to your puppet workshop essay. The associative connection the essay sparked for me was a writer’s longing for the intimacy and intensity of being part of a creative team. Writers sometimes near such relationships—while taking workshop courses, working with editors, haranguing fellow writers with interview questions, etc.—but we largely live solitary lives. Does “Collected Trout” offer us a window into your desire for an alternate creative life you wish you could access? In the book’s titular essay, you describe Book City Bloor West Village as “A bookstore, but a kind of workshop too.” Have you been able to find that alternate life, in some way, in bookstores?</p><p><b>NT:</b> I think there are two general locations in <i>If It Gets Quiet…</i>, the bookstore and the workshop. The tabletop or window display is a theatrical display, too. Also, a kind of pond. It made sense to have a theatre company at work in the middle of the book, to set up a stage where a reader could learn about these puppeteers and watch them build their imaginary worlds. I wanted to write about people who took play, and their plays, seriously. When I arrived in Calgary for ten months of work in 2015, the primary thing that I wanted to do was to visit the Old Trout Puppet Workshop and talk with the puppeteers. I had a hunch I had something to learn from them. </p><p>And yes, in hindsight, watching the Old Trouts work reminded me of the kind of magic I used to feel when me, Sue Sinclair, Kalpna Patel, Paul Vermeersch and others were all selling books together at the same store in Toronto. But the Trouts are entirely their own thing, and I wanted to honour that in the work. “Collected Trout” provides journalistic counterweight to the autobiographical elements of other essays and poems. I didn’t want to strain to connect that piece to the profile of the book, or to the sales pitch on the back cover. </p><p><b>RT:</b> Near the end of the puppet workshop essay you write, of living and creating beside the Rocky Mountains, “One may see the enormity and potential of oneself, but also the poverty of one’s own material, one’s absolute smallness.” Do you feel some equivalent to this when working in a bookstore, surrounded by towers of words? To what extent does it daunt you? Inspire you?</p><p><b>NT:</b> Bookstores only inspire me. They are my safe, happy place. I feel energized by the impossibility of being able to read everything; it calms me down. And it makes sense to me, both as a reader and as a writer, that someone would buy, say, a copy of Alejandro Zambra’s <i>The Private Life of Trees</i>, or Gwendoline Riley’s <i>My Phantoms</i>, instead of the book we’re talking about now. </p><p>Watching people make their book choices is something that helps me, at a fundamental level, see other people. It’s the place where reality, fantasy, commerce, etc. don’t always feel at odds with one another. I mean, we can talk about who owns these bookstores, what is or isn’t on the shelves, and who can afford to buy books. These conversations are important and ongoing, and I hope I gesture towards some of them in this collection. But ongoing, too, is the small talk, the idle browsing, the unexpected conversations that happen in bookstores. That’s where my jam jar is. </p><p><b>RT:</b> One of the most moving pieces in the book is “Notes on a Version of The Waste Land,” a “fictionalized essay” about poet and TS Eliot translator Fernando Vargas, who you worked with as a Creative Writing instructor while he was a patient at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. In the story, Vargas’ living quarters, a shared hospital room with little space for his books and writing, is a constant source of anxiety in his writing life. What did that experience teach you about the importance of the physical spaces in which you read, acquire, and write literature? </p><p><b>NT:</b> I hadn’t thought about that essay so much in terms of the anxiety over physical space, it being so concerned with mental health or interior spaces. You’re right, that physicality is central. And to be in a space where you can’t keep more than a few books, that’d be anxiety-producing for anyone who loves to read. </p><p>“Notes on a Version…” is the oldest piece in the book. I think that the experience of working with Fernando drove home the rather obvious point that creativity, and creative people, exist everywhere, and that the degree to which we can engage in our creativity is contingent upon a variety of factors, many of which need to change and should change, and some of which are beyond our control. He and I managed to make a space; we were two people at a table talking about books and poems with one another. We made a connection, too. I didn’t want to let that connection just slip into memory. I also wanted people to know a bit of his brilliance, even if his circumstances were not great. </p><p>More generally: any book with its nose too deep into places which are, let’s face it, often white-owned, and in neighbourhoods that have pushed low-income families out to make room for what can sometimes feel like a bourgeois or boutique experience, is not going to succeed as being a book for more than a certain kind of reader. I wanted to set pieces in hospitals, in industrial areas, on the clearcut sides of the mountain, to articulate that the experience of working in a small bookstore can be grafted onto other kinds of experiences, jobs and practices.</p><p><b>RT:</b> The range of people, places and subjects in this book is one of its great delights. While the book centres the worlds of booksellers and writers, you also explore the lives and works of many other types of artists, including painters, architects and, of course, puppeteers. </p><p>Poems about, and in response to, music and paintings have appeared in all your poetry collections. Could you talk about this interest of yours? Does a consideration of these other arts allow you to get at something—about art, about life—that is more difficult to access if you focus on writing alone?</p><p><b>NT:</b> A previous book of mine once received what I think was a criticism, something about not being sure where the influence of a particular writer ended, and my own voice began. I think about this a lot. In some respects, I want my work to have a shape distinct from the other shapes. But as is probably evident at this point of the interview, I am easily influenced by the work of others. And many times, this ease I have in relating to the work of other people, in a variety of genres or practices, feels like a strength, a way in which I am comfortable being social, with sharing ideas, seeing similarities in structures, and giving praise where praise is due. I know this capacity helps me as an editor and as a bookseller. As a writer, I’m usually less sure. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdHbKzZekiYWNi-zV5mUYoPEX8ig0lZqIVSrKghMhw_HL36iVdyL6g2SBx1WY7FOuLSwlhinGFaWGavsjSadAeKXSyTpTHxIqYx0JS4QlLQTeYxH-kPCI2d5V9mww-4ZkmuCXb8oQg4xxyANFMc_sfhIDraeNT60rloCSklwviytMvi3u91KSd/s1000/Mayor%20Snow.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="688" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdHbKzZekiYWNi-zV5mUYoPEX8ig0lZqIVSrKghMhw_HL36iVdyL6g2SBx1WY7FOuLSwlhinGFaWGavsjSadAeKXSyTpTHxIqYx0JS4QlLQTeYxH-kPCI2d5V9mww-4ZkmuCXb8oQg4xxyANFMc_sfhIDraeNT60rloCSklwviytMvi3u91KSd/s320/Mayor%20Snow.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>But I don’t see the engagement with other art forms in my poems as an interest, really. It’s just my life. Maybe it has to do with trying to rid oneself of the ego, of the preciousness that can sometimes accompany one’s identity as it relates to a singular art form. I think it’s important to think about the metaphor of an artistic diversity, like a biodiversity, as something that has the potential to save and sustain life. It never has made sense to me why anyone would impose a hierarchy of value upon, or a border between, an episode of <i>Succession</i>, an album by Frank Ocean, a quilt by Anna Torma, and a poem by Sarah Holland-Batt. And it has never made sense to me why I wouldn’t write about the ways any other person or group’s work has burrowed itself into my own consciousness, into my own point of view and practice. <p></p><p><b>RT:</b> Your ease with influence is a strength, Nick! Very much so. Another strength of yours is your endings: one of my favourite things about reading short fiction written by poets is how, and where, they wrap things up. Writing poems feel like the ultimate training ground for honing beginnings and endings—poems, especially short ones, being largely composed of these two elements. How did your years of writing poems inform your approach to writing endings in fiction? </p><p><b>NT:</b> We seem to talk a lot in our culture about a poet’s first poems and about a poet’s last poems. I do think poetry is fertile ground for beginnings and endings, as you say. </p><p>It has been harder for me to write poems in the middle of my life. When they do come, I am grateful. And I admire poets who seem to find the clearest articulations of their life-long projects somewhere in their middle poems. What an important thing, for a reader who also writes, to see others finding their ways through the middle. It’s not easy. Finding one’s way through the middle is, I think, another theme to this book.</p><p>How this beginning and ending relates to writing short fiction, I’m not sure. I don’t know that I’ve written enough fiction to have a sense. In terms of the stories that are in this collection: maybe as a poet I have a trained willingness to end abruptly, to not fill in too much or to over-explain. I think it’s Deborah Eisenberg who talks somewhere about short fiction being like having just a couple of holes in the fence between you and your neighbour. I like that sense of the short story as a fragment gesturing towards the unseen whole of another person’s life. That’s textbook poetry stuff too, is it not? “Petals on a wet black bough,” etc.</p><p><b>RT:</b> Before we wrap up, the big question: <i>If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display</i> arrives at your book store. Where do you shelve it? Where would you hope to spot it if you entered another bookstore?</p><p><b>NT:</b> Right now, there’s one in the window, a stack on the new release table, a couple copies in poetry and a couple in biography. When the launch is over, I’ll probably let my colleagues decide. Maybe we’ll crunch the numbers and see, if it moves at all, from which section it more readily moves. </p><p>As for other bookstores: my sister recently sent me a picture of my two nieces in Munro’s Books in Victoria. They were excited to see their uncle’s book in the store, and on display. It was in essays, face out on a wall of plastic brackets, underneath a new edition of Anne Carson’s <i>Eros the Bittersweet</i>. First I grilled my sister over text, you guys didn’t put it there? You just found it like that, near the Carson? Nope, she said. That’s just where it was. And so that’s where it will remain on display in my mind—with my smiling nieces, near one of the early books by one of my favourite authors, in the first bookstore that made the mystery of literature feel accessible to me. </p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-36798120781924635702023-07-27T09:00:00.001-07:002023-07-27T09:00:00.167-07:00life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus<p></p><blockquote><p>Soon after I started writing poems and stories it was drilled into me: no sentimentality, no clichés. They were the hallmarks of kitsch. Fair enough. But after years of fanatically heeding that good advice, I felt weary of always detouring around certain registers of emotion and around straightforward, demotic expressions of same. Over the years, I'd often glanced longingly in the direction of song and reflected that many of my favourites - great songs, great poetry, like Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" (1970) and John Prine's "Hello in There" (1971) - are sentimental by the standards of literary modernism. And how many times have we all happily sung along with an excellent song that revives and rehabilitates a cliché? "I'm Your Man," "Dancing in the Dark," "Coming in From the Cold," etc. Musical accompaniment can do that: elevate the sentimental (if not the maudlin) into authentic, redemptive emotion. Defibrillate the commonplace.</p><p>As I sank deeper into my 50s, I felt a longing to transcend Upper Canadian reticence and costive over-control, to quit writing in a kind of stoical code. I wanted to get up on stage, figuratively speaking, and belt out a torch song. Why not? Life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus, at least some of the time. True, I'd always been trying to do that in poetry, and maybe the lack of musical accompaniment put a useful pressure on the poems to make their own music, but somehow that was no longer enough. As Prine sang, "your heart gets bored with your mind, and it changes you."</p></blockquote><p></p><p> </p><p>- Steven Heighton, discussing his return to writing and recording music, with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of <i>The Dalhousie Review.</i> </p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-602830953940106322023-07-24T09:00:00.003-07:002023-07-24T09:00:00.159-07:00that personal theatre of dreams and grievances<p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>Alyda Faber:</b> Your free verse poetry is as crafted and concise as your poems following a defined form. Does this relate to what you say in <i>Workbook</i> about the artifice of writing?</p><p><b>Steven Heighton: </b>Artifice is essential - which is to say, form is essential. Free verse poetry either has form - an internal skeleton as opposed to the exoskeleton that you find in a sonnet, say, or a villanelle - or it's just chatter, jotting, typing. The appeal of passing off untransformed personal minutiae as art is obvious: it's easy and, if it gets read and praised, there's a really direct form of ego validation (they don't just like my writing, they like ME). Personally, even if producing such work is easier, I don't want to spend any more time than I already do in the airless little cell of my ego. For me, writing is an <i>escape</i> from ego. I understand that when you're seated in that personal theatre of dreams and grievances, you can almost believe it's the realest thing in the world and everything beyond it is less real - a figment, a projection - but the opposite is true. The world is real, and the ego is a construction - a little shadow theatre, like Plato's cave.</p></blockquote><p> </p><p>- Steven Heighton, in conversation with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of <i>The Dalhousie Review.</i> </p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-54687358060343124882023-07-06T11:19:00.001-07:002023-07-06T11:21:28.191-07:00this annoyed the man<p></p><blockquote><p>'What's your job?'</p><p>'I'm a poet,' admitted Ivan with slight unwillingness.</p><p>This annoyed the man.</p><p>'Just my bad luck!' he exclaimed, but immediately regretted it, apologised and asked : 'What's your name?'</p><p>'Bezdomny.'</p><p>'Oh . . .' said the man frowning.</p><p>'What, don't you like my poetry?' asked Ivan with curiosity.</p><p>'No, I don't.'</p><p>'Have you read any of it?'</p><p>'I've never read any of your poetry!' said the visitor tetchily.</p><p>'Then how can you say that?'</p><p>'Why shouldn't I?' retorted the visitor. 'I've read plenty of other poetry. I don't suppose by some miracle that yours is any better, but I'm ready to take it on trust. Is your poetry good?'</p><p>'Stupendous!' said Ivan boldly.</p><p>'Don't write any more! ' said the visitor imploringly.</p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>- Mikhail Bugalkov, <i>The Master and Margarita </i>(trans. Michael Glenny).</p><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-6711443033509112232023-06-20T14:59:00.001-07:002023-07-06T11:20:30.257-07:00Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #6<p> </p><blockquote><b>Mal à Hat - Penn Kemp</b></blockquote><p></p><p> </p><blockquote><p>Mal adjusted </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Hat in the ring</p><p>list ten up</p><p><br /></p><p>Re view</p><p>Re wind</p><p>Re store</p><p>Re move</p><p><br /></p><p>I am a sub scribe</p><p>If I delete all will I</p><p>surscribe?</p><div><p></p><p></p></div></blockquote><div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to <a href="http://pennkemp.weebly.com/">Penn Kemp</a> for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.</p><p><br /></p></div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-22336800993205819762023-06-20T14:53:00.000-07:002023-07-06T11:20:06.511-07:00Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #5<p> </p><blockquote><b>Not As Funny - Mary Peelen</b></blockquote><div><div><p dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-3b3e6d17-7fff-af17-ad88-c4b5ff1a6d95" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I promise that nothing you write </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">will be funny at all. You're </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">making the notifications worse. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Please correct this mistake! </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">If this is not corrected </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I will be forced to </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">“reply all” to this email. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Criminal charges are in order. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Everyone: random people, </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">famous writers including me: </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">STOP for the love of GOD </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">please stop. I'll definitely </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">send flowers. You are not </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">as funny as you imagine </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">yourself to be </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">but I will re-subscribe </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">as soon as the email fiasco </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 0.0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">is resolved. </span></p></div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to <a href="http://marypeelen.com/">Mary Peelen</a> for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.</p><p><br /></p></div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-82296654539482114452023-06-19T02:10:00.003-07:002023-06-19T02:10:48.722-07:00Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #4<p> </p><blockquote><b>"PLEASE FIX YOUR EMAIL" - Rose Morris</b></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>This morning I woke to an inbox brimming.<br />Thought it was love.<br />Get your shit together, they accidentally<br />sent one email that went to everyone.<br /><br />I have no idea how or why this message came to me. I know mistakes happen.<br /><br />I’m also receiving this email, but I don’t think I’m supposed to.<br />Gawd knows my secret membership in this rather pornographic group is a terrible fate.</p><p>My inbox is suddenly flooded with emails from people I don’t know and I am a full time writer.<br />I do not have time for this. I know mistakes happen.</p><p>I definitely have time for this.<br />Nice to meet you all.<br />I know mistakes happen.<br /><br />Please delete me.<br /><br />Please remove from list.<br /><br />Please remove me from the list.<br /><br />Please remove me from this list as well, thanks!!<br /><br />^^this is just a test to see if my “reply all” gets thru. I know mistakes happen.<br /><br />I am upset.<br /><br />I agree with George Bowering.<br /><br />I too write full time.<br /><br />If you what me on your list, you can re earn my support,<br />if you’re worth it. I know mistakes happen.<br /><br />Where the hell is the secret and one and only Northwest Mounted Police when you need them.<br /><br />With no kindness,<br />gerry sharing the pain<br /><br />Amigos, no entiendo nada de este bellísimo discurso. Que les vaya bien. Abrazos a todos.<br /><i>Friends, I understand nothing of this beautiful speech. Good luck. Hugs to all. </i></p><div><p></p><p></p></div></blockquote><div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to <a href="https://twitter.com/rosalie_morris?lang=en">Rose Morris</a> for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.</p><p><br /></p></div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-3424678938281784492023-06-19T02:02:00.001-07:002023-06-19T02:02:05.821-07:00Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #3<p></p><blockquote><p><br /></p><blockquote><p><b></b></p></blockquote><b>What the World ----- Re: Love - Tara Colbourne</b><br /><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>“I suddenly see all around us” – George Bowering “On Quadra Island”<br /></i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: left;"></blockquote><br />we say please when we mean [fuck off]<br />sometimes don’t we?<div>please check, please update, please fix or better</div><div>yet, please remove me, remove my name, remove</div><div>my love, same, same</div><div>same<br /><br />to wade through<br />all this ----- I don’t know<br />is anyone paying attention?<br /><br />I thought it was [love]<br /><br />I keep getting messages<br />from people I don’t know<br />everyone ----- please stop<br />please prevent further flooding<br />have you been accessed<br />or compromised or FLOODED<br /><br />we say fuck off sometimes when we<br />mean</div><div>[please] ----- with no kindness<br />remove me because<br />this is ridiculous<br />please ----- take me<br />off<br />forever<br /><br />please love, please</div></blockquote><div><div></div><blockquote><div><br /></div></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to <a href="https://twitter.com/Tarasee">Tara Colbourne</a> for this one. You can read all the found poems in this series <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.</p><p><br /></p></div>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-18978801821319912922023-06-19T00:47:00.003-07:002023-06-19T00:47:56.917-07:00Malahat Review Listserv Found Poem #2<p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>"A decade after I broke the malahat review listserv" - Patrick Grace</b></p><p>Oh my god I accidentally<br />sent one email.<br />I've just learned from a friend<br />a terrible fate.</p><p>As I understand it,<br />it comes from the heart--<br />"fuck off, delete me"<br />in English, it means unsubscribe.<br /><br />The poor human<br />who made this mistake again.<br />Someone alert NATO!<br />Call the police and the army!<br /><br />Something went haywire.<br />Please correct this<br />warped sense of humour.<br />You all have time for this.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thank you to <a href="http://www.anstrutherpress.com/dastardly-by-patrick-grace">Patrick Grace</a>, who brought us the 2014 meltdown, for this little gem. You can read all the found poems in this series <a href="http://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/search/label/Malahat%20listserv">here</a>. To submit your own, email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com.</p><p><br /></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-49076114870435518712023-06-18T15:20:00.001-07:002023-06-19T00:46:33.307-07:00this makes me nervous<p>Back in 2014, a reply-all unsubscribe outbreak on the Malahat Review listserv brought such joy to my heart that I wrote a found poem compiled from the various replies. You can read that poem <a href="https://rollofnickels.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-perfect-storm.html">here</a>.</p><p>One might have thought that in the intervening nine years, the Malahat Review would have addressed this flaw in their listserv system but, bless them, it appears they did not. We're back at it, and the replies are even more confused, angry and conspiratorial this time around (this is Pierre Poilievre's Canada we're living in, after all).</p><p><a href="http://reganz.com/">Rhonda Ganz</a> has stepped up to write a found poem for this year's meltdown. I present it below. If you'd like to contribute your own Malahat Review listserv found poem, please email it to me at roblucastaylor(at)gmail(dot)com and I will post it here. And most importantly, enjoy the madness while it lasts. It will be another nine years before we get to do it again!</p><p><br /></p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>Thought it was love - Rhonda Ganz</b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p>I did not get the original love, but I am getting all the replies<br /><br />My inbox suddenly flooded<br /><br />Este amar, no es un virus.<br /><br />People I don’t know <br /><br />People pressing “love” <br /><br />This makes me nervous<br /><br />(Me, too!) <br /><br />(I’m also receiving this love, but I don’t think I’m supposed to)<br /><br />(Likewise)<br /><br />Please<br /><br />I don’t think I should receive this love<br /><br />Anyone paying attention<br /><br />You’re making the love worse<br /><br />Please<br /><br />Please stop pressing “love”<br /><br />Please remove me<br /><br />Remove me from your love list immediately<br /><br />Please stop pressing “reply all” to this love<br /><br />Please take me off your love list forever<br /><br />All of you! Stop sending love!<br /><br />All of you brimming with love<br /><br />You are the problem</p></blockquote><p></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-50725393694635602472023-05-11T11:11:00.001-07:002023-06-18T14:01:54.902-07:00glimpses of how my books are carried<p></p><blockquote>During the solitary months and years spent writing a book, it can be easy to forget that it will—if you are lucky—live a social life. That your book might enter the imaginations and memories of its readers and thrive there, that your book might be crammed into pockets or backpacks and carried up mountains or to foreign countries, or that your book might be given by one person to another. Perhaps the aspects of authorship I cherish most are the glimpses I get of how my books are themselves carried, or are themselves given. When I sign books at readings, people frequently want their copies inscribed as gifts. <i>Would you make this out to my mother, who loves mountains?... to my brother, who lives in Calcutta?... to my best friend, who is ill?... to my father, who is no longer able to walk as far as he would wish...?</i> Several times I’ve been asked to inscribe books to young children who can’t yet read: <i>We want to give this book to them now, so it’s waiting for them when they’re ready for it.</i> These conversations with readers, and the stories that arise from this giving of gifts, are among the strongest of the forces that keep me writing.</blockquote><p></p><p>- Robert MacFarlane, from his essay <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/562693/the-gifts-of-reading-by-robert-macfarlane/9780241978313">The Gifts of Reading</a></i>. You can read the whole thing <a href="https://lithub.com/the-gifts-of-reading-are-many/">here</a>.</p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22966523.post-48267696554271103702023-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:002023-04-17T09:00:00.202-07:00that infinitely expanding shelter<p></p><blockquote>Beauty can’t be canceled. O’Connor is problematic, but she’s indispensable. I think of Calvino’s “Uses of Literature,” his notion of a universal library that’s always expanding around a core of canonical books. The core may be less fixed for those of us looking for alternatives to a white, male, Eurocentric canon—but the important thing is that infinitely expanding shelter, which is tethered to history but always gravitating toward what’s still outside it, toward what Calvino calls the “apocryphal.” No books are removed from this library. No books are burned. I’m not going to remove Faulkner. I’m not going to remove Wallace Stevens. I see them as flawed, complicated, dimensional people. </blockquote><p></p><p>- Terrance Hayes, from his <i>Paris Review</i> interview. You can read the whole thing <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7930/the-art-of-poetry-no-111-terrance-hayes">here</a>.</p><p><br /></p>Rob Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06507320627534702508noreply@blogger.com0