do I look like the Answer Man?

Judith Fitzgerald: What makes a poet a poet?

George Bowering: What a terrible question! I mean how should I know? I mean that's for me to know and you to find out. I mean if I told you we'd both know. I mean do I look like the Answer Man? I mean you tell me, and we'll both know. I mean it depends on a lot of variables. I mean, we're working on it.

Okay, it's time for me to quit futzing about, if that is what I have been doing.

What makes a poet a poet?

1. Insatiable curiosity about the facts.
2. An ear that likes what words do other than designate.
3. A desire to continue the work.
4. A lot of skepticism.
5. A love for oneself as a stranger to oneself.
6. A highly competitive ego-loss.
7. Compassion on the part of one of the nine muses.
8. The inability to leave the house without a book in hand.
9. A record of failing one class in high school.

- George Bowering, in interview with Judith Fitzgerald, as published at the back of Bowering's new poetry collection, Teeth, Poems 2006-2011 (Mansfield Press, 2013).

seven interviews from 2013

As the year comes to an end, I've been looking over the interviews I conducted for this blog in 2013. My stated goal last New Years was to conduct 7,000 interviews in 2013. Well, I made it 1/1000th of the way. Seven in total - all featuring authors speaking about their new books, all very satisfying for me in one way or another.

In case you missed any, here's a recap. Click away!

Susan Gillis on "The Rapids"

Al Rempel on "This Isn't The Apocalypse We'd Hoped For"

Daniel Karasik on "Hungry"

Derek Sheffield on "Through the Second Skin"

Michael Hingston on "The Dilettantes"

Renee Saklikar on "children of air india"

Mariner Janes on "The Monument Cycles"

I hope you're enjoying these as... well... I am, and since no one pays me a nickel to run this blog, the content is going to be determined by what I like! More are on the way in 2014 (mostly, I suspect, around April?).

Happy New Year, all!

as though the arts were like science

When I used to be a speaker at colleges, I’d say, “Look, practice an art, no matter how badly or how well you do it. It will make your soul grow.” That’s why you do it. You don’t do it to become famous or rich. You do it to make your soul grow. This would include singing in the shower, dancing to the radio by yourself, drawing a picture of your roommate or writing a poem or whatever. Please practice an art. Have the experience of becoming. It’s so sad that many public school systems are eliminating the arts because it’s no way to make a living. What’s important is to have the experience of becoming, which is as necessary as food or sex. It’s really quite a sensation — to become.

The trouble I’ve had with art criticism is that it discourages people from painting. Dance criticism discourages people from dancing. But hell, everyone ought to be painting. It’s such a pleasant thing to do. With critics, it has to be original, as though the arts were like science, where you make progress. Hell, there’s no need to make progress.

- Kurt Vonnegut, in interview with Stop Smiling magazine, in 2006. You can read the whole thing here.

is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction?

Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress - or even the alleged responses to it - does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so.

- Joseph Heller, in 1992, in conversation with Kurt Vonnegut and Carole Mallory for Playboy. You can read the whole thing, as a Google Document, here.

One of your New Year's resolutions...

is more Dead Poets, right? If not, don't worry, you still have plenty of time to add it to your list. If you need an extra motivation, we've put together a heckuva lineup to help kick off 2014.

The next Dead Poets Reading Series event (and our second at our new venue, the Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch) will take place on January 12th, 2013, from 3-5 PM. It will feature:

T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965), read by Russell Thornton
Max Jacob (1876 - 1944), read by Jen Currin
Zbigniew Herbert (1924 - 1998), read by Zoe Landale
D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930), read by Miranda Pearson
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950), read by Jennica Harper

I know, right? Pretty great. See you there?

You can RSVP via Facebook here. For more info, visit http://deadpoetslive.com

a type of intellectual wallpaper

What I noticed above all in seeing over 100 “Younger” Canadian Poets interacting was a disconnect between a number of poets’ work and their actual selves. Ambitious projects dominated many poets’ ideas of themselves. I could talk to a poet but then see nothing of them in their work. This isn’t always a problem but it is a problem as a trend.

It seemed to me that particularly the younger poets were suffocated by the ambition that comes from this notion of joining something as abstract and meaningless as “the new canon.” Many young poets are so busy trying to prove how brilliant they are in every syllable that their poems have no breathing room and they cease to be about something... their poetry isn’t about the world but instead uses esoteric details of the world as a type of intellectual wallpaper.

- Brad Cran, discussing his Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference, in response to Carmine Starnino's CV2 interview. You can read the whole thing here.

Show your Support for Mayor Ford Poetry

Thinking about donating to the Indiegogo campaign to pay Rob Ford's legal fees? Stop right there! I know how desperately you want to participate in a crowd-sourced fundraising activity - you get to donate to a good project AND get some christmas shopping done at the same time - but my friend, do not stoop to such a level! Especially, when the CanPo world is offering you such good alternatives:

First off, we have the local campaign to get a limited-edition hand-bound book of Christopher Levenson's Vancouver poems into production:

The chapbook will be designed by New Leaf Editions, and will include etchings by Sigrid Albert. Swag for donating includes poems, broadsheets, copies of the book and printmaking lessons. The details of the project are explained in this here video:



Click here to donate to the project.



Second up is Zachariah Wells' campaign to get himself to France so he can be present for the operatic recital of four of his poems at the Opéra National in Paris.

Zach is opening up his storage closet o' swag for this one, with signed copies of all of his (and his wife, Rachel Lebowitz's) books up for grabs, along with CDs, postcards, broadsides and poetry manuscript consultations.

Click here to donate to this project.


Neither of these campaigns, of course, will help stop the bullying, so vote with your wallet - and your heart - this December.

the absurd, the strange, the humorous - "The Monument Cycles" by Mariner Janes

ginsberg and kissinger argue in a late-night supermarket bomb bay, or, political power comes through the barrel of a sunflower - Mariner Janes

political satire became obselete when kissinger 
was awarded the nobel peace prize.
       -Tom Lehrer
what thots i had of you, henry kissinger, for i
walked under an atomic sky in silent alleys
with a headache self-conscious, looking at the angry moon.
in my angry fatigues, and shopping for images,
i went into the neon supermarket, dreaming of your conspiracies!
what obfuscations, what pomegranates! whole nuclear families
shopping at night! aisles full of chilean dictators! mercenaries in the 
avocadoes, hand grenades in the tomatoes! and you, allende, what
were you doing down by the bananas?
i saw you, kissinger, hateful, lonely old bastard,  
poking among the corpses in the refrigerator, and eyeing
the cambodian grocery boys.
i heard you asking questions of each: who killed capitalists?
what price human life? are you my antichrist?
i wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cruise missiles
following you, and followed in my imagination by the c.i.a.
where are we going, kissinger? the doors close in 
an hour.  where does your gun point tonight?
 (i touch your ears and dream of our fight in the 
supermarket and feel forlorn)
will we stroll dreaming of the lost america of love,
past green tanks in driveways, home to our oval office?
ah, dear horn-rims, lonely old assassin,
what america did you have when charon quit poling his ferry
and you got out on the smoking aisles and stood watching
the floor of the supermarket yawn wide, and 
the watermelon bombs disappear into the black sky beneath?

from The Monument Cycles
(Talonbooks, 2013).
Reprinted with permission.

A problem with the poetry book industry (Don't laugh! It's a real thing! Sort of!) is that all the action gets crammed into a couple months. The major crush of books and coverage comes in April, with a second burst of activity following in September. Between those two oases of poetry? Well...

While it's a great way to bundle activity together and in unison cry out to major media outlets "Look! We've huddled together for your convenience! Pleeeeease for the love of god look over here for a second! Give us two minutes of coverage in that segment where you usually show off adoption-ready puppies!" it's also a frustrating scenario for those of us who try to give poetry year-round attention [March: 0 interviews to conduct. April: 43 interviews to conduct. May: 0 interviews. June: Stamp collecting, maybe? Macramé?]. Which is part of why I'm so grateful for slow-cooking poets like Mariner Janes.

I first met Mariner when we were both undergrads at Simon Fraser University. I was helping start up High Altitude Poetry, the campus' cheap-n'-easy-n'-printed-on-stolen-paper poetry zine and Mariner was helping start up iamb, SFU's student lit journal. They had a budget, and paid their printer, and bound their magazine with glue (not staples), and had a recording studio with a cool mic (each issue included a CD of contributors reading their work). Unlike us, they weren't messing around. And neither, for that matter, was Mariner. His poetry back then was already fully formed - intelligent, politically sharpened, often quite funny. This guy was a pro. I figured that at any moment his first book would appear.

So I waited. And waited. A decade later I was still waiting. Mariner wasn't, however. He was busy with other things - building a life, a family, and a career. Mariner works in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) with the Portland Hotel Society (which, among other things, manages the InSite supervised injection program) as the coordinator of their Mobile Needle Exchange.

Then, early in 2013 I heard the news that Talonbooks was putting out Mariner's first book, The Monument Cycles, in April. I contacted Mariner and Talon in hopes of getting an interview out there before his Vancouver launch. The book arrived and I was thrilled with what I found. The Monument Cycles is a deep consideration of place, grounded in Vancouver's monuments and the sights and stories of the city's Downtown Eastside. Its poems are sometimes difficult, sometimes playful (with form, with language), and always thoughtful and rewarding.

Official launch photo. Hair cut in the bottom
left corner courtesy of Vina Barbershop.

We didn't quite get our interview together in time (though I went to the launch: that's the back of my head in the corner of the "official launch photo"), but I figured we'd have it all sorted out and published in time for Mariner's swing out East as part of Talon's 2013 poetry tour. Alas, Mariner was still working on his responses. Through the sweltering Summer I waited. Then crisp, cool Autumn nights. As the temperature dropped and the trees shed their leaves I began to despair. Christmas was just around the corner, and soon after that the new year and the rush of 2014 titles. Would this interview ever happen? But then, as with his book, just as I was about to abandon all hope, Mariner swept in with his interview replies.

So here is my interview with Mariner, in which we talk about monuments, bombs, writing on the DTES, and the positives and negatives of slow-cooking your book. Both interview and book were very much worth the wait. I hope you enjoy!

Mariner Janes slow-cooking, eyes set to "simmer".

Rob: Two recurring themes I see in The Monument Cycles are the DTES ("it the shangri-la", for example) and the the nuclear bomb ("a homemade sunrise"). Are these two themes very separate in your mind, or do you see them as connected in some way? If so, how?

Mariner: I can see them in both lights, really. They are, of course, quite disparate in most ways, but the binding idea between them is the concept of oblivion, of devastation, of loss, and overwhelming grief. Anyone who has lived or worked in the DTES bears witness to the difficult nature of the lives of people living there and struggling with trauma, addiction and/or mental illness, and I think that there are certainly some ties between the core issues of both. I think that at its heart, the DTES is a strong, vibrant community, made up of people who are urgently aware of their humanity, and I can only imagine that the pilots of the Enola Gay must have struggled with issues of grief, humanity, and loss before (and after) the bomb was dropped.


Rob: The first four poems of The Monument Cycles are set aside in their own section, "face to face with history", while the rest of the book is gathered in one longer section entitled "the geography of memory". Could you talk a bit about the two sections? Why was it important to you to group the "face to face with history" poems together at the front?

Mariner: The sections are grouped in a way that addresses the particular "questions" of the poems... that is to say, they are writing towards (and sometimes away from) a history grounded in place, in the visual standing in for memory. The poems in the first are an attempt to actually do what monuments themselves propose - which is to put us "face to face" with history, to force our eye/memory/thought towards the event or person encapsulated therein. The second section works towards an understanding of how these physical objects, located in space and time, fit (or don't) into the city both as a concept and a real place that we move in and through.


Rob: Continuing with your themes of physical objects and Vancouver as a "real place", The Monument Cycles either directly or indirectly references a number of Vancouver monuments. Do you think The Monument Cycles would be read differently by someone not familiar with Vancouver and its monuments? Why or why not?

Mariner: I think of course the book would be a different experience for a non-Vancouver native. However, part of the central aim still stands - to force reconsideration of the purpose of monuments, to question why we build these things in the first place. This is, I hope, a question for any city, for any mind. Even those very familiar with the monuments in question ("angelic deference", for example, is written towards the "Angel of Victory" outside Waterfront Station) will hopefully look at them differently, perhaps more critically, or at least with more curiosity and attention.


Rob: The Monument Cycles contains a number of poems titled "experiment in form #__", with the "numbers" ranging from 44 to 723. Did you number them chronologically, as you wrote them (and therefore, have you written over 700 of them?!), or are you doing something else with the numbering? As you've experimented with form, have you found certain forms more successful or interesting to you than others?

Mariner: They are numbered chronologically - although it doesn't feel like I've written that many! Lots of them are pure throwaways, because, true to "experiments" in the scientific sense, many of them don't work! The series began as an attempt to push myself/my writing style/head/focus away from things that I would "normally" point towards, and focus instead on techniques/styles that I found compelling but perhaps difficult. Some worked, some didn't. Hopefully I only crammed the ones that worked into the book!


Rob: I like that idea. A little nod to all the failures that go into the writing of one successful poem. So often I feel casual readers don't appreciate how many poems have to be written and discarded before the "book worthy" poems come along. It's like this much larger ghost-book that the author sees hovering behind their book, but no one else detects. With your numbering system you make that plain to people. Very cool.

Continuing on the theme of your experiments and play, a number of your poems contain some kind of verbal trick or joke or punning - I'm thinking here of things like pain and wastings (main and hastings) and angry fatigues (army fatigues). Do you find this conflicts with the serious subject matter of your poems? Compliments it? What effect are you aiming for this wordplay to have on the reader?

Mariner: I think this really reflects my personality in some senses - though I hate to get tangled in the author/artifact web. I'm one of those horrible punsters - I embarrass even my small children - but I think that there is a very real and serious value in deconstructing the "serious" and the "real" (a term we don't have space to discuss here) and finding the edges of humour in them. It's a way of coming to an understanding of things that may conflict with our values or our way of seeing/interpreting/comprehension. As Pinter famously said, "The more acute the experience the less articulate its expression", a statement that has affected me profoundly in terms of writing the world around me. I hope only that it may jar, disturb, knock off the pace of things enough to create a small disconnect that points out the absurd, the strange, the humorous, in things we take for granted.


Rob: I recognize a number of poems in The Monument Cycles from our days together at Simon Fraser University in the early 2000s, including "ginsberg and kissinger...". How far back do some of the poems in The Monument Cycles go? How recently were the newest ones written? How did you feel mixing them into the book alongside the newer ones?

Mariner: The oldest poems in the book indeed go back to 2003, but the newest were written shortly before the manuscript was submitted, so the book inadvertently became a selection of poems from across a rather wide expanse. This was an interesting process - because of course over that period my writing had changed a bit. I stopped shying away from the local-political, and also declared a stalemate in a mental war I'd been having with myself. So the process of selecting what fit into the book alongside the pieces that had been written expressly for it was a curious and difficult one. Thanks to great editors, publishers and the patience of those around me, I feel it came out well.


Rob: Can you speak a bit more about that "mental war" and how you resolved it? Did it lead to changes in your writing style?

Mariner: I think it did change my writing style rather significantly. As I mentioned above, although I'd been thinking about the local-political and the neighbourhood that I had been working in, I struggled (almost) endlessly around issues of exploitation. I wanted to talk about the DTES, I wanted to tell some stories, shoot out some currents of questions and concerns, but I also wanted people that I know in that neighbourhood to have a voice. It's a very cliché thing to say, but it's all too often that voices from that 'hood are drowned out in a sea of academic discourse, intrusive journalism or photography, and the chorus of developers, business owners and new residents that don't want those voices heard. I fought with my conscience, my fear of exploiting people, but in the end decided that the methodology and spirit behind the poems should win. It's not something I've ever stopped struggling with, but it has certainly changed the way I write, the way I think.


Rob: Considering that a good amount of the material in The Monument Cycles has been around for a number of years, what finally drove you to put the book out now?

Mariner: I've wanted to put a book out for ages, but didn't think that I had enough good material for it. It took the convincing of friends and editors to change that. I'm glad they did. I feel like the book is a journal of my struggles around writing. Hopefully it makes for an interesting read as it arcs across its various ages and trajectories.


Rob: In your bio at the back of your book it mentions that in your future work you aim "to incorporate the multitude of voices [you] encounter" in the DTES. Clearly in poems like "in the shangri-la" and "tents on the tracks..." you are trying out different approaches to including polyvocality in your poems. Do you plan to continue with those approaches? Take things in a new direction? Do you have a particular project in mind for book number two?

Mariner: I'm not sure I'll ever be able to stop using those techniques. I find that the idea of letting other voices direct/take over/manipulate the text is a good way for me to produce writing that accomplishes the aims I have for it. "in the shangri-la" riffs off of Gwendolyn Brooks' great poem "In the Mecca", and leaps from voice to voice and from different rooms in a fictional hotel.



I like what this technique allows - there is both a freedom and a movement in it. At the same time, I'd like to think I'll always be trying out new forms, new directions.

For book two I'd like to start looking at the body. I'm fascinated with what somebody called "non-poetic language" in poems, such as medical terminology or industrial construction slang, and though I wouldn't be the first to write about it, I've started writing a lot about blood, organs, naming, ancestry... I'll let you know when I've got it all figured out!

While we're waiting for Mariner to let us know about Book #2, you can pick up a copy of The Monument Cycles from your local bookstore, or from the Talonbooks website or Amazon.

Ghanaian Poetry's Influences

Over at One Ghana, One Voice we recently completed our series of memorial poems for Kofi Awoonor (which we organized following Awoonor's shocking death as part of the Westgate Mall shooting in Nairobi. Awoonor's death, and the tribute that followed, delayed another project we had been about to launch: "Ghanaian Poetry's Influences".

Over my years running OGOV I've received many questions about Ghanaian poetry: who's writing it, what they're writing, what shapes/influences their work, etc. Most of these questions seem hopelessly unanswerable to me - the explosion of writing, publishing and interest in Ghanaian poetry has made it a world too large and diffuse to be pinned down with clean, simple answers. Still, I realised, I did have some hard stats that could help with one of those questions.

For the past seven years, I've been asking Ghanaian poets whose writing I've published on OGOV the same question: Which poets have most influenced and informed your work? In total I've asked this question to 93 writers, the vast majority of them Ghanaian (some are international writers, writing on Ghana - such as myself). I decided I would take a stab at tracking Ghanaian poetic influences by tallying up the answers our various poets had given to that question. The results were fascinating to me, and I decided to share them over a series of posts, published throughout the month of November. They have all now been posted, and you can find the results here:

Which continent's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?

Which country's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?

Who influences Ghanaian poets more, men or women? By how much?

What types of artists are influencing Ghanaian poetry?

Which female artist most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Ghana most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Africa (non-Ghanaian) most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from Europe most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist from the Americas most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist, generally, most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Take a guess on each question, then click the link. Some of the answers may surprise you!

Anyone feel like doing something like this for Canada? I'd be curious to see the answers for that, and to contribute a vote or two.

in the power of spirits - "children of air india" by Renée Sarojini Saklikar

Exhibit (1985): fourteen. eleven. - Renée Sarojini Saklikar

His brother excels—French, English, math, science—
  he takes a paper route, 
buys milk when an old woman offers two dollars
  with the coins he fetches a carton,
holds it, high – 

Father: You took her money? She’s an old lady.
Son: But Dad, she gave me, she gave—
I ran all the way.
Father: Take the money back.

He slow-walks 
to the woman’s house.

*

Before the car drives away, before the plane takes off—
 this paper-route boy
lags behind in his home—
 everyone is waiting—
he touches each piece of furniture,
 good-bye, sofa, good-bye lamp—
  
His arm brushes 
 against a locked door.


*

Status: It is his brother’s body, found.


*

When she hears the news about her paper-route boy, the old woman—
 the woman, old, 
when she hears the news—

from children of air india
(Nightwood Editions, 2013).
Reprinted with permission.

If you've spent much time in Vancouver's literary community, you've probably heard of, or run into, Renée Saklikar. If you've heard her read, I'm sure you remember her. A co-founder of SFU's Lunch Poems reading series, and a regular blogger and interviewer on her own site, Renée is also one of the most dynamic and compelling readers in town. Much of the work she presents is part of her "life-long poem chronicle" thecanadaproject and deals with issues of place, race and identity in her life, and in the broader Canadian society.

The first "chapter" of her life-long poem, children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections (Nightwood Editions, 2013) is set to be launched on November 13th at 7 PM at SFU's Woodward's Building (149 East Hastings, Vancouver):

[Click to Enlarge]

The book explores the Air India bombing: both the event itself and the ways in which it has lived on in individual memories, court cases, media coverage, archival records, etc. It is a personal story for Renée, who lost her aunt and uncle in the bombing. children of air india is a powerful book, filled with the stories (lived, researched and imagined) of those involved in the events, most especially those who died that day, and those who were left behind. It is a compelling and haunting entry point (or re-entry point) into an event that should loom much larger than it does in our collective Canadian memory. And in the story of our country that we've constructed for ourselves.

I e-sat down with Renée to discuss the book, imagining the lives of others, the slipperiness of memory, and writing for the page v. the stage. As is often the case with my interviews (due, I hope, to the talent and assertiveness of my interviewees, and not to my complete lack of authority) Renée quickly took control of the interview, stretching out my questions, interrogating them, and making more of them then I ever could have. It's a great skill of hers, and one that makes me glad to know that she is out there working through difficult histories and ideas, and sharing her results with us.

Renée Saklikar, colour coordinating with a railing, and making it look effortless.

Rob: “Exhibit(1985): fourteen, eleven.” is part of a larger series of “Exhibit” poems that run throughout the book, adding depth to the (usually redacted) names of victims of the Air India bombing mentioned in official reports. Over and over they are some of the most powerful poems in the book. Can you speak a little about that suite of poems – how it came into being, and how it progressed? Did you feel any anxiety imagining (and constructing) the lives of strangers in this way?

Renée: Originally, this work, the first completed sequence in my life-long poem chronicle, thecanadaproject, was to have been a series of prose poems, exploring memoir as a kind of manifesto document, rather like Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, introduced to me by Wayde Compton, my mentor at The Writer’s Studio at SFU.

The deeper I entered into the archive that is Canada/Air India, the more a kind of urgency began to call out at me – that’s really the only way I can put it. There was something otherworldly about sitting and reading document after document and just getting deeper into the language of those documents.

Within the Air India archive, there exist thousands of documents, from the over twenty-year investigation into the bombing, from the lengthy trial that resulted in acquittal, and from the subsequent inquiry into that investigation as well as my own personal collection of artefacts. The more immersed I became in this archive, voices started to rise up, particularly of the eighty-two children under the age of thirteen who were murdered. The writing of this work has been over a span of about five years and during that time, I began to believe in ghosts, in the power of spirits. I believe my introduction to the book speaks to how that feels: when one becomes both transmitter and transgressor.

Coda: interesting, about that word, “victim.” It has always made me uneasy. In children of air india, the word occurs only once.


Rob: I'm glad you've mentioned thecanadaproject right off the bat. Your bio on the back of the book describes it as “a life-long poem chronicle about [your] life from India to Canada, coast to coast.” Can you speak a bit more about the project, and how children of air india fits into it?

Renée: thecanadaproject is on one level, a kind of memoir-manifesto, which explores place, identity, and hopefully many other things; also processes. It includes:

• a work-in-progress prose poem novel, The New Douglas Chronicles, about an old river town located on an imaginary West Coast;
• a series of place poems, incantations, really, about life from India to Canada, via Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Northern Ontario, Northern Quebec, Montreal, Saskatchewan and then to British Columbia;
• and a series of essays, for instance, a 6000 word essay, still unpublished, entitled, Man with Golden Helmet, in part, about my father and his life in New Westminster.

Rob: The poems in children of air india are built upon a great deal of research on your part (as the three pages of references at the back of the book make clear). What was your research process like? Did you research a great deal up front, before writing? Or did you write from personal experience and knowledge to start, and fill in the details later?

Renée: My research process was slow and cumulative. The poems would come to me as visitations, from some place that feels both holy (not quite sure what that word means, only that is important and comes to me as I contemplate this question) and also terrifying. I would spend days and evenings reading documents, reviewing correspondence, looking at records and photographs, and I would also visit sites (these are listed in the book). Then, usually, in the early mornings, sometimes in that period before dawn, the voices would start.

Rob: Building on that, while much of this book is based upon (and sometimes directly excerpted from) outside sources, much of it is also deeply personal, as your aunt and uncle were killed in the bombing. Did you wrestle with how to mix the two perspectives/narratives?

Renée: The wrestle is the work, in a way. The idea of being grieving niece and daughter; poet and writer; witness and citizen; receptacle for voices; these stances are roles that are like openings to a central dialectic: subject v object. I see the work as a kind of meditation on that spiral. What it means to be inside history and outside of it. Two writers have influenced me in this approach: Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, the interesting thing is this: I didn’t actively consider Spivak’s seminal work, Can the Subaltern Speak? until after having completed the manuscript! And yet, many of her ideas and her language for exploring this central reality of what it means to be other in any society, appear in my own work. It is as if the language of the experience came to me before I understood what it was.

Rob: Have your family members seen the book yet?

Renée: Yes. I offer this book to my family and all the families of Air India, with a sense of bowing my head before their readership.


Rob: Memory, and through it, History, are malleable forces in the poems in children of air india. I’m thinking here of poems like “June, 1985—” with its repetition of the line “Another version of this moment exists.” The poems in the book repeatedly cycle over the same moments from different perspectives and while bearing various amounts of knowledge, with each revisiting producing a different results. How did your grappling with “memory” – your own memory of the event, but also larger questions about the slipperiness of memory – shape the book?

Renée: Perhaps my previous responses speak, at least partly, to this question. Again, the waywardness of memory, its spiral intertwined with dates, locations, names, absent/still present, that is the work itself. Also, the work of grief, which never follows a straight line, which can last a lifetime, particularly in a culture which very quickly demands, “move on!”

Rob: How much do you think you “know” about the bombing?

Renée: In my past life, as a lawyer, as an occasional family spokesperson regarding Air India, I might have attempted an answer. Now, the work of the poems must suffice.

Rob: What of it can never be known?

Renée: we never speak of it


Rob: Many of these poems reference Paldi, the town on Vancouver Island where Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only person convicted for his involvement in the Air India bombing, designed and tested explosives. In the ways you consider the town, though, Paldi becomes far more than a backdrop for a single element of the larger drama. Can you tell us about Paldi and what it represents for you within the broader themes of the book?

Renée: Again, for the most part, the book must speak to these things. It is as if any language I might have to communicate about Paldi, can only be realized through the language of the poems. Here are some narrative fragments from outside the language of the book:

The Paldi Poems (as I think of them), are an attempt to situate the bombing of Air India Flight 182, Canada’s worst act of aviation terror, within the frame our complicated Pacific coast history, which is of Empire, of settlement, of intersection: race, class, location, events, individual stories.

I conducted a site visit during the work of the manuscript which is reflected in the poem series. It was a kind of pilgrimage: Paldi is one of the first settler communities to have been entered in British Columbia’s geographic name register, although, I think most British Columbians still don’t know much about it.

I wanted to visit the place where men and women from many different backgrounds had lived and worked together. It’s really beautiful and the families who remain share a rich history. My visit was to honour that history, a desire to make sacred again that which had been desecrated. Perhaps the Paldi Poems can be seen as an act of redemption.

Although, as I write that word, I’m wary of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis in her long poem Drafts, warns against, the “plumpness” of making too much meaning out of the incomprehensible.


Rob: I’ve had the privilege to see you perform your work in public on multiple occasions, and often I find your poems don’t fully come to life for me until I hear/see you recite them. Lines like “There will be nothing for you in that cadence that is the falling of their names.” (“June, 1985—”) and “the only oxygen present / is now” (“and it’s dimensions”) almost demand to be spoken aloud. Are there poems in children of air india that you particularly prefer to read in public? Do you find the experience of presenting these poems to be enjoyable?

Renée: I don’t know that enjoyable is quite the right word for the experience of reading any of these poems; but I think I know what you are getting at: I have to prepare myself emotionally, physically, and spiritually, each time I read these poems in public. Afterward, I’m exhausted. To read children of air india, out loud, perhaps for both poet and audience, is a kind of harrowing.

Rob: Are there poems that you think reside primarily in performance/public oration, and only secondly on the page?

Renée: This question interests me very much. It reminds me of questions I’ve heard put to other poets with whose reading style(s) I might share a kind of commonality: we’re expressive and alive to rhythm, and our voices project well. That said, the poems are first written for the page.

In all my writing, sound, rhythm, the breath as a kind of field, a sort of weight, silence and space—these are preoccupations stemming from the body in the act of inscription. During the writing of poems, I guess I don’t really separate writing from reading out loud, I don’t separate the page from the body.

For the poems in children of air india, as I’ve mentioned, I must prepared myself emotionally, physically, spiritually, before reading the poems out loud. It is as if the text is a kind of kryptonite and I must treat it with just enough care that the poems come through. And, also, I must take care not to care too much, lest the words drift into bathos, that shadow cousin of pathos. Always it is a kind of calibration. To keep the channel open. Performance is a site of research. I’ll be writing more about this in an essay (I say this about a lot of things, by the way!).


Rob: In the closing poem of the book, “For an Afterword that Might Be Read as a Preface”, you write “and after, there develops an ecosphere, a habitat that surrounds any public/private tragedy”. For me, this echoes lines from an earlier “un/authorized interjection”: “Those on the cusp, become centre of / a gyre” (p. 26). Clearly you put a great deal of thought into how the post-tragedy world is constructed (repaired?), and what make up its composite pieces. How do you think your book fits into those new ecospheres, both our collective one (if there is such a thing) and your personal one?

Renée: I am honoured to think that it might fit there. I will await word from the world.

You can buy a copy of Renée Saklikar's Children of Air India from your local bookstore, or from the Nightwood Editions website or Amazon. Or, if you're in Vancouver, you can pick up a copy at Renée's book launch on November 13th!