life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus

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.

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."

 

- Steven Heighton, discussing his return to writing and recording music, with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review. 

that personal theatre of dreams and grievances

Alyda Faber: Your free verse poetry is as crafted and concise as your poems following a defined form. Does this relate to what you say in Workbook about the artifice of writing?

Steven Heighton: 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 escape 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.

 

- Steven Heighton, in conversation with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review. 

a little list

whether the competitive triathlon circuit, the guild of Canadian potters, the Call of Duty or Clash of Clans video-game networks, the fly-fishers club of Alberta, dog breeding and showing associations, the professional rodeo circuit, bird-watching federations, the readers of Dentistry Today, competitive Scrabble, the Canadian literary world...

- Steven Heighton, placing CanLit among its peers, in his essay "Digital Distraction Is Bad for Creativity" in The Walrus. You can read the whole thing here.

finally prefer silence

[In] 2011, I published a collection of memos and essays on creativity, and in one memo I said... “Truly integrated, enlightened souls may dispense wise advice, but they seldom write interesting fiction or poetry. They don’t need to. The natural medium of the achieved spirit is silence.” To which I added this codicil: “The rest of us talk and write to find our way, and it’s from the rest of us—with divided, conflicted selves—that good poetry and fiction might emerge.”

More and more now, I fantasize about arriving at a place and a time when I can finally prefer silence. Of course, dreams of arrival are never more than figments. Resign yourself to the road, I keep coaching myself, there’s no arriving. To be sure, for those of us who haven’t yet accomplished our life’s work—
nearly all of us—public language, the medium of the clubhouse, remains what we have. And so we go on trying to make sense of our many solitudes, and this layered mess of a world, by deploying words as well as we can.

- Steven Heighton, from his essay "Digital Distraction Is Bad for Creativity" in The Walrus. You can read the whole thing here.

the rude intrusion of time

Ever since reading Douglas Glover’s superb essay “The Drama of Grammar,” I’ve been in love with the humble conjunction “but.” She felt she’d been more or less happily married for 11 years, but … Along with equivalent words, “but” serves as a pivot or hinge, a semantic fulcrum, a switch shunting a sentence in a fresh direction just when you thought you knew where it was headed. “But” is not going to allow you, the reader – or you the writer – to pursue an easy, plausible arc. Nothing is as it seems. Something in the latter half of the sentence wants to delve under surfaces; “but” is a quick surgical cut through which the sentence can enter as it feels its way inward, closer to the core. “But” is the bump in the carpet that trips you up just when you’re hitting your stride. Not so fast: here comes a proviso, one that won’t cancel out what came before but co-exist with it. “But” says nothing is absolute, categorical, final. “But” is the rude intrusion of time – of limitation, mortality – into a phrase that starts off Trumpishly asserting that it knows, forever. No story begins until the word “but” appears and every story, for grown-ups, ends with an invisible “but.”

- Steven Heighton, in interview with some godforsaken questionnaire over at The Globe and Mail. You can read the whole thing here.

you pledge allegiance to poetry

I mistrust all labels (who doesn’t?) and despise custodial nouns like “formalist” or “experimentalist.” I expect you feel the same way— that nouning the world is an unhealthy, essentially lazy practice. Yet we all do it, and we do it for the same reason that we map territories— to help us immobilize the chaos and navigate it. But the practice creates verbal/mental berms against reality, since reality is all flux: growth, decay, death, rebirth etc. Any artist should want to resist being nouned into nullity that way— being pinned down or penned in (pun unintentional) by abstract descriptions. Only verbs, especially present participles, can really capture what artists are trying to do— and then only for a moment. So when labellers libel Christian Bök as a mere “avant-gardist” or “Oulipian,” or describe Amanda Jernigan as a “formalist” or “neo-formalist,” I get frustrated and impatient.

As for my actual writing, I’ll use techniques that could be described as “formalist” if a particular poem seems to demand them; or I’ll write a poem that will look, on the page, almost Black Mountainish if that’s what the evolving poem seems to require. To me, such flexibility of approach is essentially just what it means to be a poet— you pledge allegiance to poetry, to language, and to the work of trying to re-enact poetic impulses in the most effective way possible, rather than flashing your membership card in the “experimental” or “lyrical” school. Or any number of other schools.

- Steven Heighton, in conversation with Jenny Haysom over at ARC Poetry Magazine. You can read the whole thing here.

rip the heart out of a wheelbarrow

Adèle Barclay: Whether you’re reading a periodical, a collection, or contest submissions, what kinds of poems catch your attention and stick with you?

Steven Heighton: My answer to that question changes all the time, depending on what's happening in my life or in the world. Right now the poems that most compel me are the ones that choke me up—poems that could rip the heart out of a wheelbarrow. I'm also gravitating toward work that emerges from the nightmind, as I call it—poems born of dreams and hallucinations. Weird, oneiric stuff. By the same token, I'm tired of poems that seem primarily to be auditioning for a collegial constituency, demonstrating the poet's fluent familiarity with the films, songs, shows, apps, etc. that he or she knows colleagues to be co-immersed in. Intertextuality of that kind can be brilliant and effective, for sure, but only in the context of work emerging from some deeper psychic impulse. More and more what Philip Larkin said about poems makes sense to me: "I didn't go looking for them, either." I guess that's it: the poems that compel me are, or at least seem to be, received, not devised.

- Steven Heighton, in interview with Adèle Barclay over at The Malahat Review. You can read the whole thing here.

part of a vast and communal enterprise

As a parent, you do have to grow up – or at least moonlight as an adult. It’s a truth that terrified me at first. I figured that “parent-mind” – preoccupied with schedules, routines, logistics, crossing chores off lists, and caring for others – would be bad for the work, and in some ways of course it is, because it devours so much time and keeps hauling you out of the sacramental mode and back into the logistical/secretarial.

But on the whole I was wrong. As with any parent who doesn’t hate the job, my vision of life and, hence, my imaginative scope have widened hugely with fatherhood. Being a parent, and thus an adult, alters your vision of time and mortality. You can’t help starting to see yourself as part of a vast and communal enterprise, instead of a discrete, isolate being (i.e. an eternal child enwombed at the navel of the cosmos). Eternal children can write nothing but lyric poems until their lyric source is depleted; or else they write self-focused, first-person Bildungsromans, one or two at the most, till that source too dries up. A child who becomes an adult – even if an incomplete, part-time, sometimes grudging one – is inducted into the world’s larger life and can never run out of material.

-Steven Heighton, in interview with Evan Jones over at Partisan. You can read the whole thing here.

one authentic subject

Deracinados - bred in suburbia, atopia, the generic North American milieu - might as well have been born in cyberspace and raised in the food court of an international airport. Or an Old Navy outlet. If they're writers, they have one authentic subject: rootlessness. They'll never have the Deep South of Flannery O'Connor, the working class New Jersey of Bruce Springsteen, the midcentury Souwesto of Alice Munro, the seething Victorian London of Dickens. Pretending to have a true place they know in a radical, intimate way can result only in frantic mimicry. Their life is a postmodern patchwork and they have no native soil. They can write only of their exile, create books that will be their one home.

- from the series of memos "New Frames of Feeling: Eclectic Dispatches" in Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing by Steven Heighton. It's a thoughtful, fun book. Writers, treat yo selves.

existentially open pores

8. The writing life's cruellest irony: while failure can make you miserable, success won't make you happy.

9. The writing life's cruellest irony: the creation of good fiction and poetry requires a life lived with existentially open pores, while handling the public side of a career requires thick skin, a closed carapace.

10. The writing life's cruellest irony: publishing authors are mostly recovering wallflowers who now seek to earn, through their writing, respect, praise, prizes, admiration, love - things they believe, consciously or un-, will retroactively salve the formative rejections of their early years. In so seeking, they bring on their adult selves more rejection and vicious personal attacks than they could ever have imagined in grade nine gym.

- from the series of memos "On Criticism" in Workbook: Memos and Dispatches on Writing by Steven Heighton. Writers, if you didn't get this book over the holidays, treat yo selves.

quote + event listing = quovent?

A great weekend of readings and events is coming up, starting with Steven Heighton and Ian Williams Thursday night at the Robson Reading Series:

Robson Reading Series
Thursday, October 14th, 7:00 PM
UBC Library/Bookstore, Robson Square
800 Robson St. (Plaza Level), Vancouver
Featuring: Steven Heighton and Ian Williams
Free!

Steven also has twelve-or-twenty answers over at rob mclennan's blog. A sample:

The problem with allowing theories or ideologies to understrap your creative work is that they prescribe answers that you unconsciously (or consciously) write towards. Which is death, I think, for any creative enterprise. But of course there are ideological, or at least moral, questions I'm posing to myself when I write. (Questions but no clear answers). These days as a writer I seem to be circling issues of ethical intervention: when is it right to intervene in a situation and when does it make matters worse? Can you even tell beforehand? I guess basically now I'm writing to try to understand how to be a good person.

Read the whole thing here.

And have a lit + fun filled = flit-filled(?) weekend:

TWS Reading Series
Friday, October 15th, 7:00 PM
Take 5 Cafe
429 Granville Street, Vancouver
Featuring: Michelle Elrick, Rachel Thompson, Alexander Winstanley, and more!
Free!


Canzine West
Saturday, October 16th, 1:00 - 7:00 PM
W2 Storyeum
151 West Cordova Street
Vancouver
$5 (includes a free copy of the latest issue of Broken Pencil)


A Taste of Words
Saturday, October 16th, 7:00 — 8:00 PM
Cafe Montmartre
4362 Main St., Vancouver
Featuring: Gurjinder Basran, Daniela Elza, Mona Fertig and Peter Haase!
Free!