This interview was first published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Antigonish Review.
Kindling – Gillian Sze
And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirrs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and plays the radiator like a piano. On tiptoes he regards the man in goggles, the slow work of shredding years and smoothing out land. Damp grass encircles an open wound. When he was just learning to crawl, my son and I sat on the kitchen floor counting knots in the wood. Now it’s just the two of us, each on two feet: one startled by how swift and brute the uprooting, another contemplating how to fly.
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Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her new collection of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, won the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
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| Gillian Sze |
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Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together?
Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.
RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way?
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| Quiet Night Think (2023) |
RT: In the book's titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as "a thing made up of... words and the spaces between them." Later in the book, you provide your father's counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared "There's nothing here - it's empty!" Throughout the book, you embrace the "space between"—between words, between languages, between cultures. It's even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title!
At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that "emptiness," which bridges a gap between your father's expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?
GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.
I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.
RT: That’s really interesting. I think many people would assume the opposite is true: that poetry, so spare on the page, is the genre that leaves you no place to hide. But I guess those gaps a poem leaves for the reader can also be hideouts for the poet’s full self.
GS: There is certainly an intimacy with the writing of poetry. I think of my earlier writing as rawer, more of my “full self.” Now I prefer to hide behind a persona, which I felt like I couldn’t do when writing the essays. I couldn’t fully escape the “non” in creative non-fiction. Fanny Howe defines the lyric as “a method of searching for something that can’t be found.” I like that—it feels like the poet invites the reader to search with them, or perhaps the poem launches the reader towards their own private discovery.
RT: In your essay "Sitting Inside the Moon," you write about the custom in Chinese culture for a mother to spend a month housebound after the birth of her child: "You come out of it no longer the same person and no longer the same poet.” Could you expand on that?
GS: Becoming a mother made me realize the expanse of time I had before motherhood. I’m writing this to you while on a plane, by the way. I was an ocean away last week, alone, just being a poet. I had never been this far from my children ever. I was removed from the demands of them, the domesticity, the routine of a home life. Instead, I was attending translation workshops, performing my work, and discussing my poetry. It was luxurious. Even being able to mull over your questions and write these answers to you, alone on a dark plane somewhere between Sao Paolo and Montreal, is luxurious.
I soon realized that as a brand new, breastfeeding mother, the time and concentration I once had for poetry was changing. I was following a different schedule, one that was intimately tied to my body and heart, and I was anxious about it all. How can I write when I’m so tired? How can I read when reading is forbidden during the month-long postpartum care? What am I missing out on when my daily life and thought processes have radically changed?
Chinese postpartum care is essential for the new mother to recover, to heal, to strengthen. It’s only now that I see how this physical healing was also an important transition period for me to accept that writing isn’t always the act of writing. It is also experiencing, thinking, becoming.
RT: In your essay "The Hesitant Gaze," you write of your desire to, like William Carlos Williams, "write with hesitance," pausing "at the sight of a leg, the taste of cold plums, a red wheelbarrow." Contrasting this desire towards the small and still are your comparatively large essays. Do you think these twin desires are in some way tied to your loss of that “expanse of time”? Some mix of the desire to observe and record a particularly vital time in life, and the lack of a physical capacity to do so?
GS: I’ve always appreciated the small shapes of poems. I don’t think it’s a surprise that I recently turned to picture book writing (another short form with its own constraints). I wonder if the longer form of the essay came about because I was finishing up my dissertation when I was pregnant. Perhaps those sentences just seeped into my creative work!
I was also reading about the lyric essay, which continues to fascinate me as a poet. The form straddles the essay and the lyric poem and moves, according to Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, “by association…by way of imagery or connotation…or sidewinding poetic logic.” Moreover, I think I was returning to the word “essay”—not the noun as we know it—but the verb “essayer” (to try). As students, we come to the essay fearfully, reluctantly. We learn it as a rigid form. Imagine my delight when I was learning that Montaigne, in Essais, was seen as playing on all the meanings of the word’s Latin root, “exagium,” which includes “trial,” “attempt,” “risk,” “exercise,” and “temptation.” He calls the essay “a ramble”—and I love the confusion and pleasure implied in that walking/talking description. G. K. Chesterton also calls the essay “the joke of literature.” Suddenly, the essay becomes a place one can wonder and wander and play.
RT: Amidst the changes in your writing, you've consistently written ekphrastic poems in response to works of art. In "The Hesitant Gaze," you write about the importance of a second "look" at a piece of art—a painting, a poem—as you, the viewer, will see it differently, having changed in the interim. This chimes with what you said about writing before/after "sitting inside the moon," and I'm curious to what extent you now think about ekphrastic writing differently. Do you now think about art in a different way than you used to?
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| Fish Bones (2009) |
RT: In the essay “Perennials,” you write about your futile determination to weed your grass, and compare it with your determination to write: “I accepted [the] mundane hell of always starting over, condemned both at my desk and in my yard.” You close the essay with the image of blowing on dandelions: accepting what you cannot defeat. I’m curious about what you see as the writerly equivalent to that weeding-acceptance? A fallow period of not writing (“I was resting from poetry,” you write in a later essay)? Silence? Or perhaps the transformation from poetry to essay?
GS: I think it’s all of the above. There was an obsession, an ongoing-ness, to weeding and to writing that I felt keenly before becoming a mother. It’s still there, but it’s different. I think sitting in the moon, having children, taking a rest from writing, were experiences that were vital for me. I worried that if I wasn’t obsessing, I would cease to be a writer. My husband was far wiser; he was confident that the writing would return. His perspective was, of course, from beyond the moon. The blowing of the dandelion is an act of surrender. It was a gesture of pause, of mercy. It was an allowance to give myself a bit more time.
RT: As you returned to writing, did you come upon this book quickly? Did you write a stretch of poems, then essays (or vice-versa), or was the composition itself also intermingled?
GS: This manuscript came together slowly and with little planning. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec supported my proposed essay project, so when I realized they were willing to fund the book, I was more attentive to essay writing. I’m always writing poetry, so that was still going on, albeit more slowly. The first completed piece in the book that really inspired me to consider a full-length essay project was “Quiet Night Think.” The final piece to enter the manuscript was “Babble.” Interestingly, the first version of “Babble” was actually my first attempt at writing poetry after becoming a mother. I returned to the (terrible) scribblings of an early draft, saw it with clearer eyes, and revised it for the book. Time and forgetfulness are useful for a writer.
RT: Ha! Absolutely. I don’t think I’d be able to edit without forgetfulness.
A central theme of Quiet Night Think is coming to a better understanding of your parents with age (and with becoming a parent yourself). Poetry was a source of division earlier in your relationship with your parents, but it also seems like it might have offered a path back for you, via your own writing and the writing of others (perhaps Emily Dickinson especially, as explored in "Fricatives," the long poem which closes your book). Could you talk about the role poetry has played in your life as a source of both division and union?
GS: It really took time, experience, and learning, to realize the irony of how poetry found me, how it shaped me, and how it fits into my life. For example, my mother, who was unable to translate Li Bai for me when I was small and who still plays down her language abilities, was really the first poet in my life when she constructed my Chinese name. I don’t think she even considers it a poetic act, but it is: to ponder over and decide on my name’s meanings and sounds. That marked me from birth. My father, so against my literary pursuits, was the one who bought me my first poetry anthology, which I’ve kept close since.
Growing up, I thought my family’s relationship towards poetry stemmed from their being of and from elsewhere, but I realize now how wrong I was. Chinese culture is full of poetry. The pictorial quality of Chinese characters. The economy and density of meaning. And poetry continues: in the musical Hokkien utterances between me and my children, in their linguistic errors because they live in three languages, in their own Chinese names, which are new poems “written” by my mother. The writing of this book was really a softening of so many parts: myself as a new mother (and a new writer), my relationship with my family, and all of us as imperfect, babbling humans.
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