"Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project - Out Soon!

I'm very excited to announce that my new poetry book, "Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project, will be published in the coming weeks from Leaf Press!

The book is the result of a 5+ year medical research project on physician empathy. The poems were inspired by, or drawn from, focus group discussions with people living with depression. Some of the poems are found poems, drawn directly from the focus group transcripts, while others are less restrained responses to the content of the discussions. I've posted some samples on my website, and you can read them here:

Sadness
Since I Was a Very Young Child
To Do
Tomorrow I’m Not Here

This is book #3 for me, but it's an entirely new venture in so many ways. One small one: it's my first book with blurbs! This one, from Sandy Shreve, describes the project so well that it serves as the introduction to the book on the back cover:

"These poems are the result of a years-long project designed to create for physicians a doorway to empathy with patients who suffer from mental illness. As it turns out, they open that door wide for us all. Here are people speaking from deep within the isolating world of depression, their stories transformed into poetry by Rob Taylor’s considerable talents. From the heart-rending admission to a friend in the first poem (“It’s the one gift / I do give you, every day / I don’t call"), to the final lines (“You walk alone / across the room, sit by the fire, / and wait there for the longest time”), this collection unveils a reality lived by far too many people, one most of us don’t know how to handle – not when we experience it ourselves, not when loved ones are going through it. Read this book. It will help."

If you're interested in getting a copy of the book, you can pre-order one via the Leaf Press website right now. And if you're in Vancouver, we'll be launching the book in January. More info to come!

Until then, please do help spread the word to any and all who may be interested in the project. I'd love to get the elephant out to as many readers as possible.

throwing a little light on it - "Short Takes on the Apocalypse" by Patricia Young

Marc Chagall - "Over the Town"

Chagall's Lovers - Patricia Young

Have faith, not cynicism.  - Erica Jong
Why up there, young lovers,
                       helium heads 
floating above the village? 
Herringbone sky and forest of spires, 
pointy church steeples...

How dare you fall in love when the world’s falling apart.

Down here death combs the countryside.
Every minstrel’s donkey’s splattered in blood. 

Come down right now. 
Your mother’s sick as a goat. 
Your father’s marching into a century of slaughter. 
Today is no one’s birthday. 
That cake is proof of nothing.

Such wedding shoes! Such light! 
Where’s it all coming from? 

Can’t keep your feet on the ground. 
Can’t keep your hands off each other. 
Can’t stop blowing upside down kisses. 

Why so ebullient, illogical, lobster-headed, topsy-turvied? 

Fine... okay... stay up there 
clucking Yiddish, barnyard babble. 

Hey... I’m talking to you too blue fan. 
I’m talking to you checked tablecloth. 
I’m talking to you the colour red.

from Short Takes on the Apocalypse
(Biblioasis, 2016).
Reprinted with permission.

Marc Chagall - "Birthday"

---

Do I need to introduce Victoria poet Patricia Young? Even if you haven't read her work, her name and writing are everywhere you turn in the Canadian literary world. The author of nine books of poetry and a collection of short stories (Airstream), Young's writing has also won or been a finalist for just about every damn literary competition in the country (including two GG award shortlistings and back-to-back years winning the ARC Magazine Poems of the Year). Most recently, her latest poetry collection, Short Takes on the Apocalypse (Biblioasis, 2016), was named a finalist for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, a prize usually dedicated to fiction. They're having to get creative to find new things to nominated her for...

Now, I know what you're thinking: winning so many awards in this country must mean your writing is about preparing for the coming winter in your Ontario village which is far enough away from Toronto to be exotic, but not so far that you can't drive there in an afternoon. And generally, yes, of course, you're right. But not in this case. Patricia Young's poems are full of sex, pop culture, and jokes (jokes, people!). The poems in Short Takes on the Apocalypse shift about in theme and subject, anchored together only by the common use of an opening epigraph, but the through-line of them all is an energy: bouncing, playful, with just enough hints of darkness to keep you grounded (as I first read the book, I wrote in my notebook that the poems reminded me of Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh, which says more about my toddler-warped-brain than anything, but feels accurate nonetheless). Reading Patricia Young's books is fun.

I had the pleasure of asking Patricia a few questions about Short Takes on the Apocalypse and its award-winning poems, along with broader questions about rule breaking, poetry as "project," and what the heck she's doing taking so much time between short story collections. I hope you enjoy!

Patricia Young's earrings are nearly as formidable as her poems.

---

Rob: Every poem in Short Takes on the Apocalypse opens with, and in some way speaks to, an epigraph. The book originated "as a response to Elmore Leonard's "Ten Rules of Writing"", though you only confront/break one of Leonard's ten rules in the book ("1. Never open a book with weather"), in your poem "Tornado in the Bible Belt". Have you always felt the desire to break rules as a writer? How do you think the sense of rebellion and mischief that originated this book filtered out and affected the poems that followed?

Patricia: Yes, mischief. My first-year Creative Writing teacher back in the seventies gave the class a list of words we were not to use in our poems – soul, moon, sadness, tears, love, etc. So I wrote a poem using all those words. Nothing came of the poem but I did enjoy writing it.

In the case of Short Takes on the Apocalypse, I didn’t set out to write a book of poems that all began with epigraphs. The book just evolved that way. I remember laughing when I read Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing” and though I agreed with them I liked the idea of trying to write poems that contradicted the rules in some way. I wrote a number of poems that argued with Leonard’s advice or did exactly the opposite of what he advised but most didn’t make it into the manuscript. But that little exercise generated the idea of pairing epigraphs with poems.


Rob: Well, if you stumbled into the idea, you stumbled into it thoroughly! Short Takes features 66 epigraphs from a wide array of people ("from Leonardo Da Vinci to Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood to Jimmy Kimmel" reads the back jacket copy). Only four contributors appear more than once: Kurt Vonnegut, Groucho Marx, Erica Jong, and everyone's favourite writer, Anonymous. That's one hell of a dinner party! How did you go about collecting the quotes? An active search, or just opening yourself to the universe, or? Were you surprised by the quotes that you were drawn to, and was there any pattern to the quotes that worked (or didn't) as epigraphs?

Marc Chagall - "Nature morte
à la nappe quadrillée"

Patricia: I like the way you put that – yes, I did search and I also opened myself to “the universe.” Once I’d written a number of mostly unsuccessful poems triggered by Elmore Leonard, I started looking for other writers “rules” or advice because it was fun playing with people’s words. I was always interested in seeing where the epigraphs would lead. Of course, that’s generally why we write poems – to find out where an image or thought or line will take us. The poem you’ve highlighted, “Chagall’s Lovers,” was the result of viewing Chagall’s paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery and coming across Erica Jong’s rules. I liked her point about writing and optimism. And optimism is exactly what Chagall’s art also seems to embody, despite the fact he was painting during the First and Second World Wars, a horrendous and bloody time in history.

The Guardian published a number of writers’ rules that I drew on. I also read interviews of writers and pulled out quotes of things they’d said. Sometimes a piece of advice triggered a poem; other times I just wrote a poem (as one does) and then sought out an epigraph that I felt added something to the poem, either by contradicting the epigraph or by throwing light on it or supporting some element of the poem.


Rob: Did you have to leave quotes you loved on the table because a poem wouldn't come (and if so, do you want to share them here)?

Patricia: Yes, I did leave hundreds of quotes on the table. Pages of them. You can imagine the amazing and funny and even profound things writers have said over the years about the craft, business and process of writing. Here are a couple of examples of those left behind:

“As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

“If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture lights all over the world and bring them to you.”
– Henry Rollins

I did write a poem triggered by the Henry Rollins quote but in the end cut it from the manuscript. Any response seemed inadequate to his words.


Rob: Though your poems are seldom purely humorous, most are speckled with jokes and winks. Is this a conscious choice of yours, or simply how you think and write? Does humour work its way into your poems differently than in your daily life?

Patricia: I don’t consciously write poems that have humourous undertones (or overtones!) but I do gravitate toward poets whose work is often wry and displays wit and humour. I’m thinking of David McFadden’s poetry, for example, or the American poets, James Tate and Mark Halliday. The “big” subjects can sometimes be best explored when a little levity is introduced.


Rob: Your debut short fiction collection, Airstream, was published by Biblioasis in 2006 to critical acclaim (including being named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year). In the eleven years since you've published five new books of poetry, but no further fiction. What's up, Patricia?

Patricia: Hell if I know! I wrote Airstream at a time when I couldn’t write poetry. I was stumped by poetry. It made no sense to me. I couldn’t read or write it. Also I was tired of poetry written from the first person, my own particularly. Fiction seemed a way out of the first person trap. I’d always loved short stories but around 2000 I began to read them not in a casual way but in a determined, I’m-going-to-figure-this-out sort of way. I went through old New Yorkers, years of them (my husband refuses to throw them out), and read all the short fiction. I also read the Journey Prize Anthologies and many collections of short fiction. Joy Williams was (and is) a favourite and inspiration. Though I’d written poetry forever, writing short stories was a huge learning experience. I know people say short fiction is like poetry in that both are condensed, every word matters and so on, but for me, writing fiction was a totally different process. Character, plot, dialogue, psychology, arc, etc. -- all those things are not required of a poem. But after publishing Airstream I was keen to write poetry again, perhaps because I’d been away from it for five years.


Rob: Those long times away from each genre are interesting, especially because the movement between lineated poem and prose poem in Short Takes is very fluid. Has the prose poem allowed you to move what drew you to short fiction into your poetry; to explore both at once?

Patricia: Often I come across poetry that reads like cut-up prose. When I find myself writing “cut-up prose” I shift to prose, to the short paragraph, to see how the piece works. My feeling is: if you’re writing sentences, acknowledge that, let your sentences have their day and be what they are.

As for the prose poem – I love the form and find myself writing prose poetry more and more lately. In a prose poem there is absolutely no room for excessive words. I like the sentence, I like narrative, the surreal leaps and huge scope of the prose poem, the sometimes upside-down world contained in a very short space. When I say “upside down” I’m thinking of Russel Edson’s prose poetry, for example, which Donald Hall describes as “fanciful” and “funny” but “carries discomfort with it, like all serious humor.”

There it is again: serious humour.


Rob: You've worked with a number of editors over the years: Michael Kenyon for some time, and also Dawn Kresan and, for this book, Anita Lahey. Could you talk about what these editors have brought to your work, and how it's shaped the final products?

Patricia: A good editor can save you from yourself. He or she sees the stories or poems (and the manuscript) from the outside and lets you know when you’re being self-indulgent or unfocused, what ought to be cut or what needs a serious re-write. I belong to a women’s writers group so I get feedback from them, but the editors you mention were the final readers and extremely helpful in all ways.


Rob: Short Takes sits in an interesting place when it comes to the current movement in Canadian poetry towards themed "projects" and away from general collections: it feels at once to be on trend, and pushing against the trend. It's a "project" united by a common technique, and yet the poems seem utterly disparate, their subject matter going wherever the epigraphs lead them. What are your thoughts on poetry books as themed projects? What do you see as the pluses and minuses to this approach?

Patricia: I enjoyed writing this book of poems because I could follow my nose, so to speak. The connection between poems is simply the epigraphs, though that is some sort of link. At one point I thought about cutting all the epigraphs and publishing the poems without them but couldn’t bear to part with so many wonderful words by other people.

I have written a few themed collections or collections of linked poems but mostly I tend to write what I call “miscellaneous” poems, poems that have no unifying theme, poems written one at a time, that are influenced by whatever I’m thinking about or reading or hear in conversation. The joy of writing a themed collection obviously is that you have a sense of what you’re going to be working on when you sit down to write. You can pick up where you left off the day before. When writing a general collection you have to face the blank screen after every poem. As a reader, I like both: miscellaneous poems because each one is a world unto itself and themed collections because they tell an extended story.


Rob: Speaking of facing the blank screen do you have a desire to "start fresh" from project to project (in theme, in style, in approach), and if so do you find it hard to shake your previous themes and techniques? Does something from one linger and move into the next? If so, what from previous books lingers in Short Takes, and what from Short Takes might linger in the next?

Patricia: Airstream was definitely a fresh project. I knew nothing about writing fiction. The first story I wrote was from the first person point of view, which was familiar because I’d written so many first person pov poems. The second story I wrote had multiple points of view, which my husband pointed out was amateurish and revealed that I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no clue about the mechanics of writing fiction until I tried to write it. I really had to start from scratch but lately, with poetry, the “fresh start” never seems to happen because while a manuscript is being put together I am writing poems which become the genesis of the next collection. Goose Lane Editions is publishing my next book of poems (tentatively titled "“Amateurs at Love") and it truly is a miscellaneous collection in that there are six distinct sections, though the sections themselves are in some sense organized around a theme. I would love to write another book of short fiction, another “fresh start” (though I have about five stories toward that fresh start). Just talking about it with you may well be the impetus I need to get on with it.

---

While you're waiting for book of fiction #2, be sure to pick up a copy of Short Takes on the Apocalypse. You can do so at your local bookstore, or from the comfort of your home via the Biblioasis website. Or, if you want to break the "Ten Rules of Responsible Book Buying", from Amazon.

Interview with Oscar Martens

Oscar Martens, staring down
yet another interviewee

Burnaby-based author Oscar Martens is on a quest to figure out how best to write and promote books in the modern age. He's set up a "Media Whore" blog as part of his website, where he asks writers about their thoughts and strategies around self-promotion, productivity, responsibility to community, and more. He's previously interviewed Sarah Taggart, Lucas Crawford, Richard Kelly Kemick, among others.

Today it was me. Though I mostly ramble on about curtains, I also talk about a good number of subjects "around" the writing itself: the community, this blog, the reading series, the interviews, etc. etc. with it all pointing toward the larger question "How should a writer be?"

You can read my answers here:

Rob Taylor, a blatant self-promoter since 2006

Kudos to Oscar for referencing the Roll of Nickel's tagline in the interview title, and thank you, to him, for all the good questions.

You can read more of Oscar's interviews here.

And while we're on the subject, you can read all of my interviews with other writers here.

November Dead Poets Lineup

The next Dead Poets Reading Series event will take place at the Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch on November 12th, 2017, from 3-5 PM. It will feature:

Lucille Clifton (1936 - 2010), read by Ian Williams
Connie Fife (1961 - 2017), read by Joanne Arnott
Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963), read by Natasha Sanders-Kay
James Welch (1940 - 2003), read by Pamela Bentley
Richard Wilbur (1921 - 2017), read by Christopher Levenson

Attendance is free. For more info visit the DPRS website.

I hope to see you on November 12th for a 100% 20th-Century (a rarity for us) poetry love fest!

Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food

I'm very pleased to have a poem in the new anthology Sustenance: Writers from BC and Beyond on the Subject of Food. Edited by Rachel Rose as part of her work as Vancouver's poet laureate (as Yvonne Blomer's Refugium was part of her term as Victoria Poet Laureate), the anthology is one element of her term's wider focus on food, which has included food-themed poetry readings, the presence of poets at local farmers markets, and much more.

My poem is "Seven Weeks" from The News (the "cranberry sauce" poem, if you're familiar with the book).

Sustenance will be launched this Sunday, October 22nd as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival (which is happening right now - go, you damn fools!). The details:

Sustenance: A Feast of Voices
Sunday, October 22nd, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Revue Stage
1601 Johnston St.
Vancouver
Featuring: Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Thomas Haas, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jami Macarty, Billeh Nickerson, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Annie Ross, Karen Shklanka, Kevin Spenst, Russell Thornton, and Ayelet Tsabari.
$10

If you can't make the main event, there will be two more (free!) launches of the book: November 4th, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM at the VPL's Kitsilano Branch and December 2nd, 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM at the VPL's Strathcona Branch.

I'm planning on being there Sunday, and I'd love to see you there as well. And regardless of the launches, I hope you find a way to pick up a copy of the book - it should be a good one.

special dogs

For me, it’s the same for both reviews and dogs: even when I’m frustrated with them, I’m happy with them. And, to continue the identification of reviews with dogs: when I look at my dog, I learn something about my dog, certainly, but also something about myself. Sometimes, something about my expectations. Certainly, something about our relationship.

...

However, I would like to take this opportunity... to thank those who have never bought or never heard of my books — all those on this planet and all those lifeforms extant in other places of the present, past, and all possible universes. You help make my books mysterious, unknown, a sanctuary for initiates and cognoscenti. You maintain the notion of my books as places of infinite possibility, as thought-and-feeling machines of limitless potential energy. You make special dogs of those who have dog-eared my work, those who have actually read it.

- Gary Barwin going full-Gary-Barwin (or at least 3/4s) in an essay on reviewing and readership over at the Hamilton Review of Books. You can read the whole thing here.

Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Vancouver launch this Thursday!)

I'll be reading at the Vancouver launch of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific this Thursday, which will take place in the recently-opened nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

The details:

Refugium Book Launch
Woo Soon Mary Lee Chan Room
October 19, 2017, 6:00 PM
nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch
730 East Hastings St.
Vancouver
Featuring: Ann Hopkinson, Jo Lilley, Jeremy Pataky, Heidi Greco, Lee Beavington, Anne Simpson, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Miranda Pearson, Luther Allen, Lorin Medley, Terri Brandmueller, Nancy Pagh, Betsy Warland, Kate Braid, Stephen Collis, David Pimm, Barbara Pelman, Cornelia Hoogland, and me.

A lovely lineup, if ever I've seen one. And the book is all the more impressive, with poems by the poets listed above, as well as Steven Heighton, Anita Lahey, Jan Zwicky, Lorna Crozier, Patricia Young and many more (not to mention musicians Bruce Cockburn and Dan Mangan!).

I am pleased to have a poem, "&", in the anthology, and doubly-pleased because my poem was selected by Refugium's cover artist, Sharon Montgomery, as the subject of an "artist response" painting, entitled "Hitched" (you can see the title of my poem on the bottom-right side!):

"Hitched" by Sharon Montgomery

I mean, how lucky can you get, right?

The painting is part of a gallery show of artist responses to Refugium poems, which will be on display at the Victoria Maritime Museum until December 17th. You can view a video tour of the show here:

Though the art won't be on display on Thursday, the poets will, and that's almost as good?

I hope to see you there!

between nostalgia and mainstream unease - "The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory" by Chris Banks

Panic Room - Chris Banks

It is seven in the morning and I can see the couple
     next door heading to work. People pull coats
around themselves, scrape frost from windshields. No
     one acknowledges anyone else, which makes it
hard to believe people are still making love, but I know
      they are, for their children are heading to school, too.
Perhaps it is like Chekhov said. When you are in love,
      it shows a person who he should be. But this world’s
day-to-day living makes mockery of such vulnerabilities
     so we stuff emotions with self-loathing, gastro pubs,
online shopping, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, social media,
     anything, really, so as not to feel human and alive. The
weather, of course, is not helping. The cold winter air
     steals our breath so we seal ourselves deeper in a living
slowly wearing people out. No one likes to talk about it,
      especially in poetry. Write about childhood or politics,
your dog or your ex, but not about the invisible fires
     of existence. When asked why he always wore black,
Chekhov said he was mourning his life. How many
     deny doing this? We watch cat videos and zombies
on television, or rail about the latest national scandal
     meant to keep us preoccupied and not thinking about
the world’s clock near midnight. A sliver of moon
     hangs like a silver scar in the morning sky. I can only
drink so much coffee before admitting I am trying
     to avoid panic attacks through apathy. Somewhere,
my children are smiling, going to school blissfully
     unaware of consciousness’s cold depths. What to do
with such thoughts? In California, a lake has fallen
     off a cliff, and still there are droughts. The Philippines
is sinking. I ask myself what am I going to do today?
     The answer is always the same: something is not right.
Time is out of joint so Prince Hamlet keeps cursing
     his wretched spoiled existence, while twenty years on,
I keep trying to celebrate all the varieties of experience
     through a few words that will break the wall grown up
between the subjective and the objective, the self
     and the other. I keep looking for release. The angels
in the high cradle we built for them mock me. So be it.
     Maybe all we are is random acts of kindness between
strangers. Maybe it is my job to hear the pain singing
     in every particle of my flesh. Maybe it means nothing.
I have probably said too much. Certainly the couple
     who smile at me when we chance meet at the mailbox
are not thinking about any of this. They are thinking
     about their ten-year anniversary and novelty lingerie
and perhaps what wine to pair with tonight’s dinner.
     Soon I will rouse myself, throw on clothes, then write
this all down. It will sound vaguely like a panic room.
     Like I have built a secret place out of my fears and joys
to linger in a while, biding what is left of my time until
     you who happen by, hearing me, throw open a door.

from The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory
(ECW Press, 2017).
Reprinted with permission.

---

I've been a fan of Chris Bank's work for some time now. In 2011, I stumbled on a copy of his 2003 debut Bonfires (Nightwood Editions) and thoroughly enjoyed it. I quickly bought his second and third books, The Cold Panes of Surfaces (Nightwood Editions, 2006) and Winter Cranes (ECW Press, 2011), and was happy to find his poems only kept getting better. A student of poets like Jack Gilbert and Larry Levis, Banks has mastered the art of carefully and artfully describing a short scene and then (or simultaneously) cracking it wide open to reveal the tender beating heart of the thing, the part of the poem most are too hesitant or cool or unaware to plunge into. I was hooked. Then I waited... and waited... and waited... for book number four.

To keep me occupied during what turned out to be a six year wait, Chris provided regular insights (in poems, in essays) on his Table Music blog. His subjects ranged from praise for poets he admired, to thoughts on poetry, to short personal essays and poems on mental health, loss and other topics. Table Music was one of the sites that gave me inspiration to keep Roll of Nickels going well past the expiry date of most blogs: I knew the impact his blogging had on me, and I hoped I could provide a fraction of the same for others.

So for more than one reason I was thrilled to see Chris' new book The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory (ECW Press, 2017) come out, and jumped at the opportunity to interview him here.

If you've read Banks' work before, you'll have noticed that the poem excerpted above ("Panic Room") differs from the poems in Banks' previous books. Unlike the shorter, meditative lyrics of his first three books, the poems that loom largest in TCVGUT sprawl, often wildly. They seem to be unraveling and gathering at once, bringing more and more of the world into them and spilling it back out, somehow transformed. They are unruly poems for our unruly moment.

The Sankofa Bird

And while this book is certainly "of our moment" it also is not. It is steeped in the past as much as the future. In reading it I was reminded of the West African Sankofa bird - the image of a bird pointed forward, but looking backward. Like the Sankofa bird this book presses always onward while stretching back for a past it can't quite reach. It makes for a an emotionally compelling, thought-provoking read.

Our interview touched on the major themes of the book: nostalgia, our current political and cultural "moment", mental health, modern poetics, Chris' writing role models, and more. I hope you enjoy it!

Some say the Grand Unification Theory is a model in particle physics in which the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model which define the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, or forces, are merged into one single force. But I say it explains how Chris Banks can combine "flannel" and "pirate" so seamlessly.

---

Rob: The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory (TCVGUT) is steeped in youthful nostalgia, opening with an epigraph from Larry Levis' "Boy in Video Arcade", followed by your "All-Night Arcade" and moving out from there to cover corner stores, bush parties, punk bars, even the 1914 death of the last passenger pigeon. And yet TCVGUT is also very forward looking, concerned with suicide bombers and climate change and the world to come.

The title poem in TCVGUT opens "I am not asking for anything except a little wisdom / from this life." What role does nostalgia play in gaining that "little wisdom", for you? Or is it more of a pure escape than I am allowing it to be?

Chris: When I started writing this book, I thought it was going to be a book about the Eighties and nostalgia and youth. Nostalgia is an idealized version of the past. It appeals to our wish to return to a simpler time. An Edenic place. I think this is very seductive for writers. The idea you can revisit the past and change it. To make your personal history meaningful in the way a myth is meaningful. Nostalgia leads you to the gates of the sacred home. Perhaps you can’t live there, but you can see through to the strange terrain of the past even if the present moment bars the way.


Rob: "The strange terrain of the past" - yes! Your interest in navigating that nostalgic path feels like a through-line which strings together not just this book, but all of your books (Winter Cranes, for instance, opens with a reminiscence of driving home from a barn dance, "Stand by Me" on the radio). But in TCVGUT your memories seem fractured, disjointed, jumbled in with the cultural and political noise of the here and now. It's less a telling of linear stories than a piling on, and up, of everything.

In many ways this feels like a development in keeping with our times - both our internet age of endless-link-Wikipedia-wormholes, and our current poetry, where stacking and swirling many images and scenes into wild little diamonds is increasingly popular - but I don't want to presume the "why" of these developments in your own writing. Could you speak a bit about how your writing style, and your thinking behind it, changed in the six years between Winter Cranes and TCVGUT?

The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory

Chris: I wrote a third of the new book the way I always had, very meditative and narrative, but suddenly this other voice started to make demands which was exciting and a little frightening. Up to this point, I had honed my poetic voice by mining the past. However, new poems started coming out in this disjointed rapid-fire anxious stream of images and thoughts. We live in turbulent times. I guess I was wondering how do you make sense of art in a Youtube universe where climate change is a regular feature on television news? New poems embraced these challenges but I think nostalgia is still there as a buffer, as a way to retreat a little from our modern times. For me, my favorite poems ride that edge between nostalgia and mainstream unease.


Rob: Yes, I agree. The best poems in the book pull in and balance everything (the "then", the "now", the political, the personal). In "Reality Check" you write "Yes, I am leaving parts out of the frame" and throughout TCVGUT we get glimpses of your personal life amidst the nostalgia-and-politics-stacking. But they are only these little flashes. Lines like these, from "Selfie with 10,000 Things":

No one has ever told you this, but the self, the soul, 
burns brightest with a bomb strapped to its back -- 
   illness, say, or a doomed relationship. Alcoholism. 
The hell we made."

That very last "we", and all it opens up.

A subtler shift comes between books, with poems about "my wife" in Winter Cranes replaced by poems about "my ex-wife" in TCVGUT. Beyond the book, in 2014 on your wonderful blog, Table Music, you spoke very thoughtfully about your recurring struggles with depression. Not to go all Barbara Walters on you, but it doesn't feel like a stretch to say the book was written in, or out of, a very trying time in your life.

How much do you see that time, and the person you were, in these poems (how much are they "in the frame", for you)? Or were the poems a way to escape, or transcend, a very difficult period in your life?

Chris: I live with recurrent major depression and I am also recovering from alcohol dependence. I have been sober for a few years now. Both were factors in my marriage ending, but as painful as it can be to talk about such things, keeping secrets is far worse for someone living in recovery. I basically had a nervous breakdown during the writing of this book and I think my anxiety became far worse after I stop medicating with alcohol, which is one reason these new poems emerged. I am very friendly with my ex and she is proud of my progress. If I can help others through writing about such experiences, I am very happy to add what little I can to the conversation around mental health.


Rob: I really appreciate your saying, and doing that, both now and in the past on your blog. It makes a bigger difference than your know.

Shifting gears: very few of the poems in TCVGUT were published in traditional literary magazines (though a number did come out in your Anstruther Press chapbook Invaders). Most were published, slowly and steadily, on Table Music. Why did you make this decision, and would you recommend it to others? More generally, do you think your maintenance of Table Music has shaped your poems, and your thinking about poetry, in any way? If so, how?

Chris: I wrote a third of the book over the course of several years. The next two-thirds I wrote in an anxious rush over four manic months. I think you write the poem that is in front of you and sometimes that takes time to figure out. Other times it is necessary to write even if you don’t have a subject in mind. For me, the time had come for me to write poems very quickly to help reduce the anxiety affecting me. The blog is helpful in that I can put poems up on it and I can immediately see their flaws. It makes for very rapid editing. I am trying to get more poems out to magazines lately but the blog has always been important in helping me to share my ideas about imagery, or time, in poetry, or any other topic of interest that catches my fancy.


Rob: Sticking with the blog, one of my favourite things about Table Music has been how it's introduced me to new writers, most notably Larry Levis, and how it's deepened my appreciation of others, most notably Jack Gilbert. Then I open this book and those two poets are everywhere, from TCVGUT's aforementioned Levis epigraph, to the book's third poem ("I was / pen pals with Jack Gilbert. Larry Levis too."), to the excerpted poem above ("Panic Room"), which notes that we avoid writing about "the invisible fires of existence" (which feels, to me, like a nod to Gilbert's The Great Fires, and everything he aimed to do in that book). Could you speak about the role of these two writers in your life, in general, and specifically how they helped you shape and think about the poems in this book?

Chris: One of the things I wanted to do with my blog was to pay homage to those poets who have been great teachers for me. I think anyone who has come across the poetry of Jack Gilbert or Larry Levis knows their work is truly remarkable. Their poetry has been an incredible gift in my life. Both were very serious poets who did not worry about their critical reception and, in the case of Gilbert, actively stayed out of poetry circles. I live in Waterloo, Ontario, so I only have a very marginal relationship with the larger poetry communities in Toronto and Hamilton. It has helped me reading both of these gentlemen to know one can write fine poetry without being immediately dropped into a large literary community. Gilbert was a master lyric poet. Levis’s grand vision elevated every place he grew up or visited. Both have taught me more than I can say.


Rob: Speaking of relating to the larger literary community, those "invisible fires" lines in "Panic Room" also serve as a good example of how you directly inject your opinions on modern poetry into these poems ("Write about childhood or politics, / your dog or your ex, but not about the invisible fires / of existence."). Another favourite of mine, from the title poem: "Maybe I'm being / greedy wanting art to be more than a bowl of fruit, / wanting there to be answers."

Reading lines like these reminded me of a quote by Zach Wells, from a Maisonneuve interview many moons ago:

"There’s a way in which just about any poem a person writes can be interpreted as a statement of poetics. Ideally, I think, that’s actually the way it should be: i.e. poems should be the means by which a person — whether poet or reader — arrives at poetics, as opposed to poetics being the way one arrives at poems."

I was wondering about your thoughts on this quote; on poetics coming out of poems and not vice-versa. When you come to an opinion about poetry, do you usually desire first to channel it into a poem, or a blog post, or a conversation with a friend (in Toronto or Hamilton or otherwise), or?

Chris: I think I come to ideas about poetics very slowly but then, yes, they filter through my practise in the ways you have suggested above. I absolutely love the nostalgic poems in Winter Cranes but then with this new book I am also saying nostalgia is not enough. It won’t save you. In fact, in “All Night Arcade” I mention “Nostalgia is a verdict for not living well” which ghostly echoes Leonard Cohen who said poetry was a verdict. So yes, poems are about poetics and vice-versa.


Rob: On a more practical level, with all the stacking going on in these poems (of political events, personal anecdotes, one-liner observations on society, poetics, etc.), how do you gather the individual bits together? Do you have a notebook where you keep smaller thoughts before collaging them together, or do you pull them from the ether as you write a new poem?

Chris: Sometimes I will keep lines that didn’t work in a previous poem but mainly I try to write my poems very quickly and not edit too much when I am writing. I think because I wrote so slowly for five years, I had this reservoir of images, things I needed to say, just under the surface which is why, when I “broke free”, the rest of the book was finished so quickly.


Rob: Are you writing now (and at a similar clip?), or are you going to make us wait another six years for the next book?

Chris: I have finished another manuscript already called The Book Of The Dead For Dummies which should come out with ECW Press in about two years. Again, I am writing very quickly for whatever reason. I am just following where the poems lead me.

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Buy The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory quick, or Chris will go and write five more books while you dawdle. You can do so at your local bookstore, or from the comfort of your home via the ECW Press website. Or, if you want to burn in the invisible fires for eternity, from Amazon.

Victoria Reading this Friday

I'll be reading in Victoria this Friday at the Planet Earth Poetry series. Even better, I'll be sharing the stage with the wonderful Adèle Barclay!

The details:

Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series
October 13th, 2017
7:30 PM
Hillside Coffee and Tea
1633 Hillside Ave
Victoria, BC

Arrive by 7 PM if you want to participate in the open mic.

I hope to see you there, Victoria-folk!