a gift to myself: "This Will Be Good" by Mallory Tater

Loss is Loss - Mallory Tater

I used to tell Margaret I hated her because she was pretty. That kind of hate makes people listen. We wrote poetry on ailing computers that would turn our words to webdings, refuse to change them back. I loved how she barely loved anyone. Margaret had a mole beside her nose. We always referred to it as beauty, a small strawberry, a she. Surgically removed winter, our senior year. Benign. She told me that after the procedure, when the plastic surgeon rubbed Vaseline on her frozen face, somehow she thought of me. Margaret like-liked our poetry teacher who wrote a song about how empty we would one day be. The chorus: his wife and son folding socks, packing. The bridge: seeing them years later in the produce aisle, the son not letting go of a bag of lemons to shake his hand. That same teacher sat on an exercise ball and told us when his son was two weeks old, he almost died in his arms and until we experience this, how can we become writers. I still remember Margaret, with a comically bandaged face, in front of the girl’s room mirror, cupping water and the Pill to her mouth, saying loss is loss, isn’t that good enough.

from This Will Be Good
(Book*hug, 2018).
Reprinted with permission.

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If there was a list of new, good things in the Vancouver writing world, Mallory Tater's fingerprints would be all over the top items. A recent UBC Creative Writing grad, she is the publisher of Rahila's Ghost Press (Vancouver's first new poetry chapbook publisher since David Zieroth set up the Alfred Gustav Press a decade ago) and the creator of Glamato: Stiff Drinks and Strong Women, an interview series with Vancouver's up-and-coming female writers.

This Will Be Good

Her latest contribution to the Vancouver writing world is her debut poetry collection This Will Be Good (Book*hug, 2018). The book tells the story of how a young woman's life is transformed by an eating disorder, her body become a site of control and chaos at once. "My body turns / to milk. My body turns on me" she writes in "Insomnia in Two Parts" (33), and then later "Body. It was once mine." (45).

In many ways closely mirroring Tater's own life, the story is told in a plain-spoken, direct manner: "Mum wanted me to fail / at bulimia, the losing. I used to love the losing" (47), she writes, her speaker's hips cramping "as though they have sinned" (55), her body waking "early, guilty / and simple" (57), her "bile fistfuls of autumn mums" (47). The result is haunting at times, reassuring at others, as we watch the speaker persist through her illness.

This Will Be Good joins a growing circle of Canadian poetry books on mental illnesses which have been published in recent years, including Jim Johnstone's The Chemical Life, Shane Neilson's Dysphoria, Kevin Spenst's Ignite, Marc di Saverio's Sanatorium Songs, and Book*hug's own Andrew McEwan's If Pressed. Like many of those books, This Will Be Good does great work in destigmatizing a disorder by bringing us deep into the world of a person living with it.

This Will Be Good launches in Vancouver on April 17th, alongside new books by Chelene Knight and Mallory's fiancee, Curtis Leblanc (they recently got engaged, and both have their debut collections coming out this Spring - revolting, I know!). The details:

Vancouver Launch: Mallory Tater, Chelene Knight & Curtis LeBlanc
Tuesday, April 17, 7:00 PM
The American
926 Main Street, Vancouver
Free!

In advance of the launch, I spoke with Mallory about the book, writing about eating disorders, great-great-grandmothers, and grotto holy water. I hope you enjoy!

Mallory Tater makes her addition to the "Poets on Staircases" collection.

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Rob: The poems in This Will Be Good speak about, among other people, your three sisters to whom the book is dedicated (Monica, Meredith and Madeline - your parents were really into "M" names!). It feels, in that sense, like a book unequivocally about you, a "memoir in verse," of sorts. The book's back copy pulls that back a bit, saying the book is about "a young woman’s burgeoning femininity as it brushes up against an emerging eating disorder" [Emphasis mine]. Poetry books, of course, have the ability to live productively in a space between fiction and non-fiction. Could you speak a bit about why you chose to write this book as poetry, and not another genre? Do you think your choice of poetry changed what you chose to talk about, what you didn't, or what you learned about yourself in the process?

Mallory: This book is based off my life but I am not the speaker in full. It is autobiographical in many ways but to write and heal, I believe that that creative distance is important and enables moments to be pulled back or pushed harder emotionally and also admits that memory brims with each individual's unique perception. Poetry has the ability to hold a range of emotions in very dense, evocative ways. I think I wanted the sense of vignettes, as opposed to a more succinct creative non-fiction essay, to explore mental illness. Poetry also acts as a kind of scrapbook which suits the “coming of age-ness” in regards to the speaker. I think poetry enabled me to navigate the surreal detachedness experienced by the speaker and provided me with a more wandering lens as well as the ability to delve into dream and metaphor to explore anorexia.

I learned through writing this book that I held onto a lot of feelings of self-doubt, especially with the few poems that tackle intimidation and childhood bullying. I can’t go back in time to give myself a hug and a good, encouraging conversation (which I wished for a lot of the time before I wrote the book.) What I could do was re-experience those feelings. It was a form of adult-young self-conversation. It may seem weird, but I know my childhood self would find motivation in this book to keep working toward self-love.


Rob: No, not weird at all. So much effort is put into how to “reach” people who are dealing with mental health issues, when a great deal of what people need is just to be listened to, and to see their experience reflected in the world. I think many people will see their lives reflected in your book.

"Loss is Loss" touches on an element of that need for reflection: that question, "am I worthy?" (of treatment, support, love). We know that so many people struggle with their mental health in one way or another, yet there is still so much silence, so much looking over the fence at our neighbours, wondering and judging and comparing. You mentioned that writing these poems was a way to heal - were you always comfortable writing about anorexia? Could you talk a bit about your journey toward putting your experiences into these poems? How do Margaret's sentiments resonate with you, looking back on "Loss is Loss" now?

Mallory: I wasn’t always comfortable about writing about the body, celebratory or otherwise, and I think it took me a while to learn that even bodily shame, discomfort and disordered eating hold stories and are worth writing about, and could even become cathartic to write about.

I think “Loss is Loss” attempts to capture the idea of not feeling worthy enough as a young person due to limited life experiences. But young people experience joy, pain, trauma and hardship as much as adults do and the speaker’s friend, Margaret, shows she does have valid thoughts and life experience although she doesn’t seem to believe it herself. She loses her birthmark on her face, which feels strange for her, and she is on birth control for the first time. She also wants to be a writer but feels voiceless and discouraged. A big part of writing this book was going back into my adolescent mind-frame and seeing what I believed no one to care about, a time when maybe I felt voiceless, and subverting that as a sort of gift to myself and my childhood friends.


Rob: I like that idea of a book as a gift to yourself and your friends – an empowering reimagining. It speaks, though, to the trickiness in writing a book that lives in that space between autobiography and fiction: once the book is published, readers often assuming everything they read is (unsubverted) fact. I remember, after my first book came out, someone consoling me over a poem I'd written - about a loved one dying in a hospital - which was completely fictional. I didn't have the heart to correct them!

Do you have any trepidation in how people might respond to this book, especially people you grew up with, for those reasons (and compounded with the stigma still abounds around eating disorders)? If people have seen the book already, have any of their responses surprised you?

Mallory: I am fortunate to have so many strong women and supporters around me who are relieved, excited and supportive that I’ve tried to navigate the body and eating disorders in this book. I guess the most interesting note I’ve received from my friends in the way of feedback is that they didn’t realize how sad the book would be—how sad the speaker feels in their own skin on her journey to body acceptance and reclamation. I’ve made some people close to me well up with certain poems, but they’ve also expressed needing an outlet for those particular tears in regards to bodily dissatisfaction, adolescence and early sexuality.


Rob: Isn’t it amazing how sad “sad” can feel when it’s spoken honestly, without any propping up? We all experience it inside ourselves, to greater or lesser effect at various times, but it still shocks when we encounter it laid out plainly on the page.

It’s encouraging to see that more and more people are willing to write openly and truthfully about mental health in the way you have in This Will Be Good. It feels like we’re currently experiencing a wave of new books in this area. Did you have any inspirations or models (books or otherwise) in pursuing the themes in This Will Be Good? What role do you hope the book will serve for readers who might be struggling in similar ways?

Mallory: A book of poetry that moves me that explores mental health is Broom Broom by Brecken Hancock. I also love Binary Star, a novel by Sarah Gerard that explores anorexia and substance abuse. They’re both brilliant, raw and exciting works.

If anyone struggling with disordered eating, anxiety, self-doubt or self-hatred reads my collection, I hope they feel a sense of being held by a like-minded speaker, and encouraged to find their own personal avenue to seek healing. I hope it motivates more women and young girls to write their truth through poetry.


Rob: The poems in This Will Be Good touch upon the speaker being raised in a religious household (notably, the father importing holy water from a grotto and building a special dispenser for it in their house). Were you raised in a religious household? If so, what impact do you think that had on your interest in poetry, and on the nature of this book and its central themes?

Mallory: I was raised in a very Catholic household and have since become an atheist. I think being raised in a certain belief system and constantly questioning that system led me to poetry. Poetry helped me raise my doubts and navigate where my personal, true values lie while still maintaining a sense of remembrance, and to my surprise, nostalgia at times, for the faith foundation in my childhood household. I am a ritual-oriented person and although I prefer poetry as my own ritual now, practicing faith was an encircling act in my early childhood that connected me to my family, whether or not I truly deeply believed in the prayers or concepts.


Rob: The poem "Rahila Corches" tells the story of the speaker looking for her great-great-grandmother's grave - Rahila Corches being your real great-great-grandmother, after whom your new chapbook press, Rahila's Ghost Press, is named. Why were you drawn to her, and her story, of those of all your ancestors? Why did you choose to name your new chapbook press after her?

Mallory: My partner, Curtis LeBlanc, and I travelled to Saskatchewan a couple of years ago. He was researching his novel in Wilcox and I was researching my Romanian ancestry in Dysart. Through family history anthologies, I got really attached to Rahila Corches, my great-great-grandmother. She came to Canada with her husband and children in 1900. She died when she was twenty-six years old from unknown causes. In the St. George Romanian Orthodox Cemetery in Dysart SK, her death is recorded in the parish registry as "extraordinary." Her body isn’t in the cemetery despite claims to the contrary on all the cemetery records I researched. It isn’t there. I want to honour her and my ancestral routes with creation. The press isn’t necessarily about her but my story lies with her.


Rob: Speaking of the press, what do you have coming down the pipe over at RGP? And what might we expect next from you, in your own writing?

Mallory: Rahila’s Ghost Press is in the process of publishing our second set of amazing authors — Ramna Safeer, Molly Cross-Blanchard and Meghan Harrison. Stay tuned!

Myself, I just signed with an agency for my novel, The Birth Yard, so I am looking forward to switching gears into fiction as the project evolves. (But, I am still writing poems.) I also have some vows to write for my and Curtis LeBlanc’s Fall wedding!

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Get in the marrying spirit and hitch yourself to a copy of This Will be Good. You can pick one up at your local bookstore, or via the Book*hug website or, I suppose, from Amazon.

outside of the rhetoric - "Dagoretti Corner" by Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

Fatigue - Ngwatilo Mawiyoo
Kwale County, February 2013

Shivering, you have walked to your mind’s edge.
Walk no further. Leave the question
of these severed blood relatives,

leave it with the mango tree. Can it bear
fruit when it is too young to shade its own stem?
Can it save those called lazy, sinful, thief, witch;
those who named them so?

Let the tree answer, let it live or die. You need
yourself more than questions need answers.
You cannot bend the head of one,
make him lick the wound of another,
knowing the wound and the tongue are septic.

Let God do it. Let Him manure the tree
if He wants. Let Him hold up the branches,
whisper the heavying twigs strong
so the fruit does not tear green
as is happening to you even now.
Let Him stop the rain and shine the sun.

You, let the tree alone.
The genes of different seeds have already combined
though they accuse and sentence each other maniacally,
long after the graft has taken,
after the sap of one is the sap of the other,
is you. You must let the tree answer. You
do not need the answer to survive.

from Dagoretti Corner
(Akashic Books/APBF, 2016).
Reprinted with permission.

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I'm going full circle here at Roll of Nickels. One of my very first interviews on this site was for a chapbook - Adrienne Gruber's Everything Water - but since then I've focused exclusively on full trade collections. Five years after my last chapbook interview, I'm back, and for very good reason. Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, friend and recently-named finalist for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize - has a new chapbook out. But this thing is no ordinary photocopy-and-staple one-off.

Dagoretti Corner is one of eight chapbooks included in New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tatu) (Akashic Books/African Poetry Book Fund, 2016). The third box set in the series, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, "Tatu" ("three" in Swahili) includes works by D.M. Aderibigbe, Chielozona Eze, Hope Wabuke, and more. Each slick chapbook features cover art by Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor.

The box set will be launching for public sale later this month, but in advance of that, on April 4th Ngwatilo will be hosting a Vancouver launch for her contribution to the box set. The details:

Dagoretti Corner Vancouver Launch
Monday, April 4th, 5 PM
Green College, UBC
6201 Cecil Green Park Road
Featuring: Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Raoul Fernandes and Elee Karljii Gardiner
Free!

I got a chance to read Dagoretti Corner, and ogle the gorgeous box set, in advance. Named for an intersection in Nairobi, Kenya, Dagoretti Corner is firmly grounded in Kenya, its politics and cultures (and trees!), but also almost effortlessly transcends the local and speaks - often incredibly powerful - to universal hopes and fears, wounds and blessings.

The poems in Dagoretti Corner are also carefully crafted, though they often hide it well. Look again at "Fatigue" - a seemingly "unstructured" poem, its stanzas grow from three, to four, to five, to six, to seven lines - gaining "weight" as they go, becoming more laborious things as the "Fatigue" builds. Dagoretti Corner also includes the rarest form of sestina - the kind so carefully woven you don't even notice is a sestina until you're almost at the end. It's a very moving, very thoughtful, very skillful collection, and only the tip of an eight-chapbook iceberg that's well worth picking up.

In anticipation of Ngwatilo's launch on Monday, and the box set's release later in April, I sat down with Ngwatilo and asked her a few questions. I hope you enjoy the result!

Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, putting on a good face while Rob constantly interrupts her with editor's notes.

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Rob: "Fatigue" is tagged with the date "February 2013" - the month before Kenya's 2013 Presidential Election, the first since the violence of the 2008 election. That 2008 election, its violence and ethnic tension, and the subsequent violence and instability Kenya has faced (including the al-Shabaab attacks at Westgate Mall and Garissa University College), sit front and centre in Dagoretti Corner (though perhaps, as I consider your publication timeline, Garissa only looms somewhere in your editing process). Because of this, I came to view "Fatigue" as the cornerstone poem in the collection - both for its subject matter, and its spirit. It is simultaneously hopeful and hopeless, empowered and disempowered (in this and other ways it reminded me of Muriel Rukeyser's "Ballad of Orange and Grape").

I know the poem does a great deal of the talking for you, but can you add anything in prose about how you felt in February 2013, readying yourself for the election?

Ngwatilo: Thank you so much for giving these poems such close attention. I really appreciate that. [Ed. note - You're welcome! Flattering your interviewer is always encouraged here at Roll of Nickels.]

February 2013 was a difficult time. I'd traveled to Moyale on Kenya's northern border with Ethiopia, and then to Tiwi on the coast near the southern border with Tanzania. If any communities with a sizable population are marginalized in Kenya, it's those who live along the coast and in the north. They are largely Muslim, and have been so since before the missionaries came; Kenya's political elite thinks of itself as Christian. There are also real and perceived cultural differences between the political elite and northern and coastal groups, and real unjust actions that go back three presidents and various colonial administrations. These problems aren’t ancient history, they are present enduring sources of pain exacerbated by everything at election time. I was also worn out from the This Kenyan Life project, and in a place of fatigue, and hopelessness. At that moment it was clear to me that the country could not be fixed, and trying to fix it was less important than surviving it all. I guess the poem speaks to the generation that's grown as a product of the mess, and has a chance to fall from the tree, so to speak, a chance to become something else, if only it could reach a point of maturity while still on the tree.


Rob: Ah, that sets me up well for my next question! As I spoke of above, "Fatigue" fits very well within the major themes of Dagoretti Corner. It also fits within a smaller theme I found running through the book: tree poems (esp. mango trees)! In your opening poem, "Portrait", grandfathers who are "in the ground" are described as being "bone and smoothed tree." In "The Rain is Late" children "wring mangoes from the tree" and give them to the speaker, and then on the next page "Ngoma for Mango" explores the mango's "salty-lemon-masala-sweet". After all that,"Fatigue" arrives with its gene-mixing, grafted mango tree, which seems to hold within itself an entire nation.

Could you speak a little about what the mango tree represents for you in your poetry? Does it change from poem to poem, or does it carry for you a relatively consistent emblematic power?

Ngwatilo: I suppose my relationship with mangoes and mango trees is a living relationship. It’s become a tree that means childhood and home, but also holds the possibility for corruption, sensuality, joy and betrayal. When writing from diaspora, mangoes are especially prone to show up in my writing because that’s when I’m most sick for them! But trees, more generally, lend themselves to poetry. There’s a history about how they came into a place, how they survived, what they signify or are associated with in the community where they exist. When I haven’t been obsessed with mangoes, I’ve been obsessed with Jacaranda trees, which are very iconic of Nairobi (and its colonial history).


Rob: You mentioned above your This Kenyan Life project, in which you visited 20 different families, in 20 different parts of Kenya, over 200 days from 2011 to 2013. Could you speak a little about that project? To what extent is Dagoretti Corner a direct result of those 200 days?

Ngwatilo: I have to begin by admitting that while 200 days was the intention of my This Kenyan Life project, I was only able to complete 7 different parts of Kenya in 70 days, although it became more than 7 families. I’m still making peace with barely getting to half, even though I’m very proud of the 70 days I did accomplish. The basic idea of This Kenyan Life was to be able to meet a diversity of families living across rural Kenya, live with them, work alongside them as far as was possible, witness their joys and sorrows, listen to their concerns, and ultimately see how similar or different Kenyan families are from each other. In the context of the violence of 2008, which was ethnically and politically motivated, I thought it was important to seek out Kenyan people outside of the rhetoric, at the family level, and possibly write an experience that was authentic to their experience, and could offer an alternative narrative to Kenyans and the outside world.


Rob: You've certainly done that, for those of us looking in from outside. On that theme: in the title poem you write "I am always / on the edge of things." which got me thinking about the insider/outsider dynamics of your own writing life. You write a great deal about Nairobi and Kenya, and do so both as an insider (when talking about your own life, the city of your birth, etc.) and as an outsider (when traveling to other towns and villages in This Kenyan Life), and you publish those poems both inside Kenya and internationally (where they are bound to be interpreted at least somewhat differently). On top of that you've written, workshopped and edited many of these poems during your Undergraduate and Graduate degrees in North America. In other words, it seems to me that you've written about, and from, and to, a lot of edges. And it's meant a lot of kaleidoscoping between the known and unknown, both for you and your readers.

Could you speak a little to this sensation of being so often "on the edge"? In what ways, if any, do you think it's strengthened you as a writer? And what keeps you tethered as a writer, and as a person, throughout it all?

Ngwatilo: It’s an astute observation, Rob. Kenya itself is incredibly diverse, whatever anyone tells you. I knew what it was to be an insider/outsider even before I ever left Nairobi. My trouble is I keep moving myself around so that sometimes I’m part of an inside group, sometimes I’m rotating through outsider spaces. It’s tedious in that I find myself always having to define and redefine my identity and its meaning in the particular community I’m living among at a given moment. And it’s hard to be consistent especially the more you know about the “other,” and come to understand them. As a writer I try to find language to write across these spaces as honestly as I can. How do I stay tethered? I don't know.


Rob: More specifically, for this collection, you worked on (and "workshopped") many of these poems while pursuing your MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. How do you think working on these poems in a place so distant (physically, but not just) from Kenya influenced the collection? More generally, in what ways do you think Dagoretti Corner would have been different/the same if you hadn't traveled to Vancouver or pursued your MFA?

Ngwatilo: Workshopping the poems in Canada forced me to think about how “outsiders” (read: non-Kenyans) would hear the poems. This was both useful and burdensome. I think by the end of it I learned when it was important to me/the poem to articulate place in a direct way, and when I would let the poem just be. It's occurred to me that if I'd been writing from home, there may have been more poems like "Fatigue" actually, perhaps distance truncated the frustration I felt.


Rob: Interesting. Yes, I agree that it's easier to be forgiving about your home when you're away from it. Distance also numbs certain pains, and heightens others. I remember, when the Westgate Mall attack happened, feeling a distant form of sadness, but then, when I heard that Kofi Awoonor - a poet I'd admired for years - had died in the attack, it became this visceral, personal pain that took a long time for me to shake off.

"Site of Sorrow", your poem about Awoonor and Westgate Mall attack opens with an epigraph from Awoonor: "Something has happened to me / the things so great I cannot weep". When I read that I could hardly breathe, and all my memories and pain of that day came rushing back to me. I remember the shock and horror of it, of course, but mostly my deep sadness at losing such a vital and influential poet, one whose role could not be easily replaced. And also, learning the news from North America, a sadness that the loss the African poetry community was sharing wouldn't be felt nearly as hard in North America, where Awoonor was far less well known.

I feel like a good way to honour Awoonor is to draw attention to others like him who are still writing and teaching and guiding the next generation. As such, can you recommend a poet or two who are already well known to African poetry audiences, but may be unknown to North American readers? Poets, perhaps, who shaped and informed your writing in the way that Awoonor did for many?

Ngwatilo: As far as I can tell we’re not yet at a place where “African poetry audiences” are necessarily aware of poets across the continent. Some cities/countries are fortunate to have poets from across the continent and around the world traveling in and out, and may be more aware of a range of people working in the form. But when a poet of such range crosses your path, your path becomes narrower and more expansive. I have to say Kobus Moolman has been a favorite for several years now. He actually just won the 2015 Glenna Luschei Prize so hopefully North American audiences will have a a better chance at knowing his work. In East Africa and Kenya we just lost Marjorie Oludhe who was a mainstay in poetry (and fiction) for many many years. Actually she also wrote a beautiful piece that’s in the new Kwani? for Kofi Awoonor. 2016 is also the year we’re remembering Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek’s influential work Song of Lawino, which most Kenyans know and probably had to study in school.

[Ed. Note - You can read my interview with Okot p'Bitek's daughter, Juliane Okot Bitek, here]


Rob: Yes, you're right - when I say "African poetry audience" I'm really meaning "Accra/Lagos/Nairobi/Cape Town" audience. It's good to be reminded of that. Speaking more specifically, then: I know you haven't been home in Nairobi all that long, but I'm interested in a little "status report" about the current moment in Kenyan poetry. Have you noticed any differences in what's happening now compared to when you were in Kenya pre-MFA? What elements of the Kenyan "scene" (oh how I loathe that word!) do you think are currently the strongest? What areas could use more attention?

Ngwatilo: Our schooling and opportunities to get involved with poetry have tended to focus on performance sometimes at the expense of the text upon which any performance might be based. Performance still seems to be a strong value for us, although I have come across more poets who are more principally interested in their texts, and in building a body of work. The level of commitment to craft is growing, and things that people are doing with language (in terms of English, Sheng, Kiswahili etc) continue to be interesting.


Rob: Can you give us some details of your Vancouver launch for Dagoretti Corner, on April 4th?

Ngwatilo: I have a reading at UBC’s Green College for Monday, April 4th at 5pm! Tell everyone to come! [Ed. note - Everyone! Go! RSVP on Facebook here!] It’s essentially a pre-launch for the chapbook, since the box-set becomes officially available on April 19th. For me personally it’s a celebration of my time at UBC, a marker of my time in the MFA program and living at Green College. I’m grateful to have some very special guests with me, including 2016 BC Book prize nominee Raoul Fernandes [Ed. note - You can read my interview with Raoul here] and Thursdays Writing Collective founder and convener Elee Kraljii Gardiner [Ed. note - Interview forthcoming!], who’s highly anticipated book serpentine loop is just out this spring from Anvil press. It will be a chance to gather together, listen to some poems, possibly make off with some books, and have a good time.

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Can't make it to Ngwatilo's launch? Starting April 5th 2016, you can order a copy of New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tatu) from the Akashic website. Or, if you must, you can order it on Amazon.

long after I've stopped making sense - "For Your Safety Please Hold On" by Kayla Czaga

Song - Kayla Czaga

Outside my window, seagulls and crows continue
the discourse on language, insisting it need not be beautiful
to be song. If song accompanies their shallow black
and white bickering over garbage at 5 a.m., do I still believe

language needs to be beautiful? Their insistent discourse
pecks holes in the morning. Here I am still trying
to believe, at 5 a.m., despite the bickering over garbage
because faith describes perfectly how my mother is dying.

Here I am still trying to peck holes in the morning;
song is just another word I use for wanting
faith to describe how perfectly my mother is dying
thousands of miles away, in a small town I rarely visit.

Song is just another word I want to use.
Illness is just another word. Mother is just a word
thousands of miles away, in a small town I rarely visit.
The winter light pours slowly into my window.

Illness is just a word. Mother is just a word
with someone in it. Can I sing without words?
The slow winter light pours through my window.
Long after I’ve stopped making sense, I’m just a sound

with someone in it. Can I sing without words
and still be song, accompanying the crows, shallow and black,
making sense with just sounds? Long after I’ve stopped,
seagulls and crows continue outside my window.

from For Your Safety Please Hold On
(Nightwood Editions, 2014).
Reprinted with permission.

On Sunday, October 19th, Kayla Czaga will launch her debut poetry collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions), alongside three other Nightwood authors: Matt Rader, Alex Leslie and Elaine Woo. The details:

Nightwood Editions Fall 2014 Book Launch
Sunday, October 19th, 7pm
Grand Luxe Hall
303 East 8th Avenue
Vancouver
Featuring: Kayla Czaga, Matt Rader, Alex Leslie, and Elaine Woo
Free!





I've had the opportunity to get to know Kayla and her work over the last year or so, and I was very much looking forward to getting a copy of For Your Safety Please Hold On in my hands. When I finally did, I wasn't disappointed - it's a terrifically strong debut.

If there’s a central concern in For Your Safety Please Hold On, I would say it’s: what are we to do with all these people? The book overflows with people – Mother, Father, Grandparents, Not-Grandparents, Aunts, Drunk Uncles, children, strangers, lovers, murderers, the murdered, ministers, neighbours, and Aaron the EpiPen kid (to name but a few). I suppose most books are peopled well enough, but few seem as concerned with the complexity and sheer volume of people that overwhelm modern urban life. In the second section of the book, “The Family,” Czaga seems to ask again and again: Who is family? What is family? And what defines its borders?

Those questions spill out over the rest of the book to cover much of the world: fellow bus passengers, Blockbuster employees, coffee shop customers. “Lord, it is hard to love / your people, so fast they go / thru drive-thrus.” (77) she says at one point. “The people watched the smoke of the Lord / barreling the Lord’s commandments / down the mountain. So the people / settled into their confusion.” (88) she says at another.

The question always hovering, rarely asked, pointed at most firmly in the title poem (in which the speaker contemplates the titular warning sign on the bus, and wishes to graffiti to the end of it the words “to each other”) seems to be: How are we, fellow people, not family? How are you not my comrade, my brother, my sister?

For Your Safety Please Hold On takes on all these questions gracefully – always with a sense of play and a deep and evident love of language, and often with a wink. It makes you look up at your neighbours (in the office, on the bus, converging at the mail box) and, if not understand them better, at least desire to.

In other words: it's good stuff. Kayla and I exchanged a few emails about her book, and the conversation wandered as they do from kicked in front doors, to pigeons and coffee shops, to an overabundance of "fucks." Enjoy!

Kayla, wondering what to do with this small person (who, she stresses,
is not her own small person - don't worry Mom and Dad!)

Rob: In reading For Your Safety Please Hold On, especially the poems in the “Mother and Father” and “The Family” sections, I got the sense that what I was reading about was your “poetry family,” a family adjacent to your actual family, stretched and transformed however your love of play and language suggested. In fact, it feels like you’ve built an entire “poetry family” cosmology (Mom, Dad, Grandparents, Not-Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles), which is probably what Paul Vermeersch is referring to on the back cover blurb when he says reading your book “feels rather like an initiation into the clan”.

Does any of the above ring true? Has your family seen the book? What has been their response?

Kayla: It’s interesting that you use the word cosmology. I think I focused on family as a way to locate myself. Each of the family members expresses a different way of being in the world. In writing about them, I got a chance to try on their language, see how they fit, and decide how I wanted to live in response.

My dad has seen a few of my poems and he likes to “correct” details and tell me that he doesn’t quite “get” them. We have long talks about what he thinks is going on. Once, during a hockey period break, he wrote “his kind of rhyming poem” and mailed it to me, hand written on a piece of loose-leaf. So, he's trying to participate.

Last night, my mom phoned and asked me to explain, “Poem for Jeff,” the poem in my book in which I use the f-word about a hundred times. “I’ve never heard you talk like that,” she explained. I think I actually offended her. I felt pretty embarrassed, but I think she likes the book, otherwise. She said she was going to read it again and call me back.


Rob: Ha! Yes, my first book had one "fuck" in it and I definitely hear about it a disproportionate amount (though my mother's never mentioned it). Your answer got me thinking about the speakers and voices in the book. Would you say this book is written in one common voice/from one common speaker, or does it change from section to section, poem to poem? When your mom says she's "never heard you talk like that," do you think of it as "you" talking in the first place?

Kayla: Sometimes it's me. Sometimes, as in "My Father, Winning me $242 dollars at the Kitimat Golf & Country Club, Last Christmas," I'm trying to speak as my dad, or someone else. More often, while writing, I feel like I'm just this device that poems get downloaded into on their way to the world. The poems are not me speaking, but speaking through me. I realize that sounds very strange, especially given the amount of details in the poems that come from my life, but that's what it feels like.


Rob: One of the great pleasures of your book is its sense of play. Puns abound (“She was a hoot, owling outside / the barn”, 30) and so many of these poems are steeped in jokes and turns of phrase and a general relishing in language. Many of the poems, however, also deal with heady subjects – death, murder, grief, isolation, etc. What purpose does inserting playfulness into heavy poems serve for you? Have you written any poems, in the book or otherwise, where you felt that such play would detract from the poem, and avoided it?

Kayla: Last summer, when my grandfather died, my father (who is in his 60s) had to kick down the door of his house because my grandfather never gave anyone a full set of keys. Sad, yes, but also very funny—all of us sweating in the driveway with our suitcases. I believe in the old maxim about light making the darkness darker. One of my favourite quotes goes, “How goofy and awful is life,” (Dean Young).

My classmates have accused me of using humour as a defense mechanism when talking about emotional things. Maybe they are on to something, but I prefer laughing to taking myself too seriously.

No, I can’t “play” with everything. The poem you chose to stand for the book (and coincidentally the book’s only formal poem), “Song,” is basically as serious as I get, as is the poem “Victoria Soto.” It is sometimes disrespectful to be funny.


Rob: I had the pleasure to hear you read Gertrude Stein at a recent Dead Poets Reading Series event. In introducing Stein’s poems, you mentioned that she had had a great impact on your writing – that she had been one of the poets who gave you permission to do new things in your writing. I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit more – which elements of this book do you think most clearly demonstrate her influence?

Kayla: I found Gertrude Stein at the right time in my life. I was pretty bored with lyric poetry and she set my hair on fire. I got shivers reading her. Still do. I think she helped loosen my fixation on “making sense.” Or, she helped me make a different kind of sense. The entire “FOR PLAY” section is a semi-homage to her and the influence of her writing.


Rob: Knowing a bit about your biography (born and raised in Kitimat, now living in Vancouver), I came to read the section “For Your Safety Please Hold On” as your “Vancouver Poems” – chronicling your shift from a small, intimate sense of community and family, to the big, chaotic urban mess that we rarely, if ever, consider familial. Reading poems like “23rd Birthday” and “For Your Safety...”, and lines from later in the book like “The Lord led me to a city / with a dripping, concrete sky / and fourteen thousand coffee // joints.” (82) gave me a clear sense of the city as seen from the outside. In what ways do you think your first book would have been different if you had never moved to Vancouver?

Kayla: I spent five years in Victoria between Vancouver and Kitimat, so I don’t feel like my transition into Vancouver has been very extreme or disruptive.

I actually hadn’t even thought of that section as Vancouver poems until you mentioned it. You are right; they are predominantly set in Vancouver. I see it as my “I’m an adult now” poem section. I spent a while creating the poem-voice that speaks in the way that I think—that scattered, fascinated, shy way. That voice feels more like what that section represents than the background details that make up those poems, but I’m sure For Your Safety Please Hold On would be a completely different book if I had moved to Montreal instead, as I had planned to.


Rob: Montreal's loss is our gain! Looking back through your book, are you able to better see or understand your own feelings about Vancouver? If so, what are they?

Kayla: I wish I could just insert one of the poems as answer to this question because they do a better job of articulating my feelings. I am really fascinated by Vancouver—really excited about how much there is to do and how many pigeons and coffee shops and good bits of fish there are—but I’m also overwhelmed and I find myself less patient and willing to engage with strangers than in a smaller town because there are just too many of them and they are too often forced into my physical space due to overcrowding. I hope that comes through in the book.


Rob: It certainly does. Alongside the crowds and pigeons and coffee shops, God makes a few appearances in For Your Safety Please Hold On - mostly notably in poems like “Temporary” and in the long poem which closes the book, “Many Metaphorical Birds.” Could you speak a bit about whatever religious upbringing you might have had, and if/how your connection to religion has changed over the years? Has poetry come to compliment, or replace, any parts of your life that you consider (or once would have considered) “religious”?

Kayla: My dad is an atheist and my mom is “spiritual” in a general way. I was a fairly rebellious teenager and one of the most effectively rebellious things I did was convert to Christianity. Since it’s always been a personal, rather than familial thing, I haven’t experienced the same falling out with it that some kids raised in religious homes have. My faith has changed and evolved, of course, as everything does all the time.

Spiritual traditions, family, and poetry—these are all ways of attaching to a bigger thing than the self, of plugging into a narrative. I think religion is a different barrel of fish than poetry, however, and I don’t think one can build a worldview out of a genre of writing, but it can compliment and help deepen many spiritual practices.


Rob: Now that you have your first book – now that it’s a real thing you can hold in your hands – what purpose do you think it serves? (i.e. if your book were a machine, what would be its function?) When you envision someone picking it up and reading it, what do you hope they get from it? And does your answer differ at all from the answer you think you would have given three or four years ago, when your first book was still an abstract concept?

Kayla: Wallace Stevens said it is the poet’s job to help people live their lives. I don’t know if I can aspire to something so lofty, but that’s how poetry “works” for me.

Poems are little machines you pour your thinking into and your thinking comes out differently, hopefully better, from the dispensing end. Maybe my poems will be a partner in someone’s ongoing thinking, or maybe they will amuse someone on her long bus rides. Maybe they will be cut up into nice collages or used to line a litter box.

Years ago, I thought I would have more figured out by now, that by having a book I would have “arrived” in some way as a person. Nope. Still can’t find my keys. Still don’t know anything. I’m happier knowing nothing now, though—it means I can still be surprised.

Surprise Kayla by picking up a copy of For Your Safety Please Hold On from your local bookstore, or from the Nightwood Editions website or Amazon. Or better yet, show up at her launch. She won't know to see it coming.

pictures don't cut it, not completely - "Bonsai Love" by Diane Tucker

Time-lapse Video - Diane Tucker

You’ve given yourself, on every plane,
to time and to its rushing.

Your body complying somehow with my dreams,
losing its cohesion, becoming a speeding mist
pushed along just above the earth, a hurrying cloud.

You want to twist away from me, become a blur,
the face of anyone, neck curled into any bent elbow.

You want to wipe yourself out of me and become a blur,
time held back by a box until space melts into mere movement.

You want to melt, become the pattern in the wallpaper,
the shadow of a door ajar, a two-dimensional spill
of watery ink on a moment’s onionskin page.

At what moment does the body become a smudge,
a pool of thumb-wiped colour bleeding into another pool?

from Bonsai Love
(Harbour Publishing, 2014).
Reprinted with permission.

Diane Tucker has been on a bit of a roll of late - a novel (His Sweet Favour, Thistledown Press, 2009) and a play (Here Breaks The Heart: the Loves of Christina Rossetti, Fire Exit Theatre, 2013) have come out in relatively quick succession. But it's been seven years since her last book of poetry, and eighteen since the book prior - her debut, God on His Haunches (Nightwood, 1996) - was shortlisted for the Gerard Lampert Award.

So despite Diane's productivity, her third poetry collection, Bonsai Love (Harbour Publishing, 2014), seems long overdue. Diane will be launching the book on Sunday, April 27th at 7 PM at the Cottage Bistro (4468 Main Street, Vancouver). She's got a snazzy launch poster and everything:

(click to enlarge)

I've known Diane for quite some time now - she's ever-present at events, and is welcoming and encouraging to new poets young and old. A while back, when I was much newer to the writing community, I was panicked upon arriving at a reading to discover that my co-feature had cancelled at the last minute. Scandal! Disaster! Diane, who I'd only just met at the time, came in early for the reading and heard about my predicament. She hadn't brought anything of her own to read, but, taking a gamble, she ran across the street to a used bookstore. Much to my relief, she came back grinning from ear to ear with a copy of Bright Scarves of Hours in her hand. The reading went off without a hitch, and we had a good laugh about what was perhaps history's happiest meeting between a poet and their book in a used bookstore.

Years later, I'm now very happy to be able to work with Diane as co-coordinators of the Dead Poets Reading Series, and can't wait to celebrate her latest collection. Diane and I exchanged a few emails about Bonsai Love, and what follows is the result. I hope you enjoy the read!

Diane, having just stolen some lights from Granville Street
and affixed them in her house, pauses to celebrate.

Rob: I love "Time Lapse Video" and I wonder if it is an ekphrastic poem — i.e. if it is based off of a particular source video. If so, I was wondering if you'd mind speaking a bit about the source? And if not, perhaps speak more generally about the inspiration that brought about the poem?

Diane: No, it’s not an ekphrastic poem, I’m sure of that. It’s been a few years since I wrote it… I’m pretty sure I was thinking about a person dear to me that I’d not seen for a very long time. I’m not young anymore (50 next year!), and one begins to forget things. I have to think hard to remember my grandparents’ voices, for example, grandparents I grew up with living in my house but who have been dead for almost three decades. And I’m starting to lose the names of people from my childhood and people I don’t see regularly. It’s frightening.

So as far as the images in the poem, I made them up, simple as that. It’s certainly probable that it was written in a season or on a day of mist, rain, blur. There are plenty of those around here. And you will find another “time-lapse” image in my first book, in the title poem, "God on His Haunches”, where I refer to God as a “time-lapse photographer”. Apparently I like that.

I do remember distinctly that the first couplet and the last were originally flipped. The poem began with the question and ended with the sparse assertive statement. Something bothered me about the poem and I kept tinkering. When I flipped them, when I put the question at the end, the whole thing fell into place. I think it gives a greater sense of powerlessness and alarm, of the narrator thinking, “What’s happening?!” and remaining in that moment of loss.

Because I think there is also the sense of the poem’s object wanting to be forgotten, wanting to live as though the relationship had never happened. It’s convenient for us at times to live with the dangerous idea that we can compartmentalize ourselves, our relationships and periods of time in our lives. As though everything didn’t affect us to the core all the time in ways we cannot begin to fathom.


Rob: "The dangerous idea that we can compartmentalize ourselves"... yes, I like that, and it brings me to my thoughts about the religious elements of Bonsai Love.

Right off the bat, with the opening poem "Prologue: Eve as rib", you declare that you won't be shying away from religious themes and imagery in the book. I'll admit that, despite being the son of a United Church minister, and happily raised in the church, this gave me a moment of hesitation. These days it feels hard to discuss religion (big R or small) without being sucked into US political battles around Creationism, anti-gay legislation, and other byproducts of the ever-churning American "religious right." For me, this has sadly meant that the main reasons people are drawn to, and stay within, religions — love, community, and the collective searching meaning — are almost impossible to discuss, as they are drowned out by all that right-wing political noise (and the equally loud left-wing push back). It's in this much healthier way that I read Bonsai Love as (in some ways) a religious text, and in this way I'm grateful to you for taking the risk of wading into "religious" territory during our current political moment.

Do any of my thoughts above about Bonsai Love right true to you? Do you consider it to be a religious book? And if so, do you consider that a risk?

Diane: Lots of questions in that question! [Editor's note: Yes, sorry, one day I'll learn to compartmentalize my questions!] The foundational truth of my life is that I am a Christian. Bonsai Love is a religious book only in the sense that everything a believer does is, ideally, informed by her faith, insofar as her faith is integrated into her being. And one of the great goals of a Christian’s life is that there be progressively less and less difference between who one is on the inside and how one lives on the outside. A Christian trusts that God is doing this work. So I feel no compulsion to use poems to proselytize or push an institutional agenda. In my experience that produces lousy poetry anyway, and letting bad poetry into the world intentionally is a kind of sin. I trust what poetry is; my faith is the faith of the Word, and the Word made flesh, after all! No better endorsement of the metaphor and all it implies than Jesus himself: God’s Word made flesh. And I trust what Jesus said about the truth making you free. And if the truth makes you free, then I am free to tell the truth and trust God with the results. Thomas Merton’s writing taught me that, to do all I can to be “detached from the results” of my work.

That said, in this culture espousing any belief as an absolute spiritual truth is a risk. But in Canada we still have freedom of religion and thought and speech, which we need to diligently and zealously protect. I will protect anyone’s right to say that Jesus was a dirty lunatic just as anyone else should protect my right to say that he is the Lord.

If my poetry helps you think about “religion” (such a problematic word!) in a less politically polarizing way, then amen to that! That’s no way to think about nearly anything.


Rob: This desire for there being "progressively less and less difference between who one is on the inside and how one lives on the outside" resonates with me, and seems well reflected in your book. That the book involves religious themes flows naturally from that. That said, a handful of the poems ("Eve as rib", for starters) take on religious images and stories very directly and (seemingly) intentionally. In those cases, did you set out to tackle religious stories directly, or did they too slip in there organically?

Diane: Organically, absolutely. Again, it’s who I am. I don’t have to try to wedge it in someplace. What is perhaps not so organic is the choice of poems and their order. I consciously left out of the book some poems I have written that deal more explicitly with Christian topics or biblical themes, because when I decided to assemble the story of a romantic relationship I used poems that would serve that theme. Which is why Adam and Eve scraped in there by the skin of their naked bums.


Rob: Yes, I've been meaning to ask you about this relationship that runs through the book. Is it, as you seem to be suggesting, a composite you assembled during the editing process for this book, or? And why did you choose to structure the book in this way?

Diane: Each individual poem in the book is about a real thing or person in my life. But the whole, the manuscript, is a composite, assembled to create a narrative arc that can be read as a story, if the reader chooses to imagine it. One must choose to enter into it, just as one chooses to enter the world of a work of prose fiction. Or simply read the poems as poems; ignore the narrative if it distracts or irks you. No problem.

Why structure the book this way? Well, it makes room for a bunch of poems that span a good fifteen years of my life, and perhaps allows me to examine this area of myself — I’m what they call a “hopeless romantic” — without a preoccupying amount of autobiography. My, that sounds cagey, doesn’t it?


Rob: One of my favourite elements of Bonsai Love is the series of ghazals that runs throughout the book. They are written on various objects ("Cup", "Hands", "Pearl") with the repeating word at the end of each couplet being the title object. Could you speak a bit about your interest in the form, and also about how you composed the poems: did you write them out linearly, or did you write a bunch of couplets and rearrange them? Was the editorial process one more of building up, or paring down?

Diane: About ten years ago I wrote a bunch of ghazals and enjoyed it so much. The form lets you walk around something and poke it from different angles; the poet gets to be all the various blind men touching all the parts of the elephant, if I can use that old one — and that seems just a gift. I wanted to respect the form as much as I could, without being ridiculous. The form has served Persian poets for centuries so surely there must be something to it! I remember writing some with my name in the last couplet (that’s part of the original form), but that got silly and distracted from the whole so I gave up on that bit.

With some of them I had to pare down — I had too many things to say! But not all. The one about hands was the first and the richest for me to write. I even took one of the couplets out of it after it was published in a magazine and before it went into the Bonsai Love manuscript, to help it fit better into this book. That’s one of the nice things about the form; it’s endlessly tweakable. I was experimenting with a number of forms for a few years there, and the ghazal form seemed to suit me. I haven’t actually written one for years. Maybe I need to give it another go.

Diane knows her objects,
especially mugs and earrings.

Rob: Please do! Continuing from the ghazals, which are all meditations — in one way or another — on physical objects, they are joined in the book by many other poems that turn over and inspect items in different ways. My inexhaustive list of "things" considered in the book includes: scabs, books, a wine glass, an earring, beach glass, shadows, bread, cheese, apples, hearts, and, of course, cups, hands and pearls. What was it about writing object poems that drew you to them so strongly? What did they unlock? What did they allow you to see or say?

Diane: The best way to answer this question is with Gerard Manley Hopkins and his idea of “inscape” (an idea he derived from medieval philosopher Duns Scotus): that each created thing has its own unique inner qualities, that which is itself and nothing else.

"[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it.”

- Stephen Greenblatt et al., Ed. "Gerard Manley Hopkins." The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

This renders even the most humble object an ocean of meaning, a depth that I think is corroborated by many of the findings of modern nuclear physics. The unmediated realness of reality — how does it come to us but through objects?

Christianity’s most important ceremony, the Eucharist, has at its centre two common substances, bread and wine. But they are infinitely dense with meaning in that context, and in themselves perfectly beautiful and complex enough to bear all that meaning.

And of course objects connect us to other people — the Pearl ghazal in the book, for example, is strongly connected to my mother because it was her birthstone and she always had lots of pearl jewelry. They connect us to the unreachable past; they connect us to other places. Why do we bring home a souvenir from a faraway place? To remember. Pictures don’t cut it, not completely. I want to hold in my hand now, here, the thing I held in my hand there, then. It’s a way of pinning an Eternity button on a fleeing Time, I think.


Rob: Speaking of time (and how it flees), you have had an interesting publishing timeline: a book of poems in 1996, then no books for 11 years, then three books and a play in the last seven years. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that that publication gap had something to do with raising your children, but I was wondering if you could speak about it a little more. What was that time in-between books like? Were you comfortable with it? Stifled by it? And does it feel like vertigo now, to have all these publications in such a (comparably) short span?

Diane: Those eleven years were increasingly difficult, in that respect. Yes, husband and I were was raising two children who are now duly raised, but all that time I never stopped writing and sending and writing and sending. I had a manuscript of poems to send out only two years after the first book was published, but it never got accepted; I sent it out a good twenty times. I picked it apart and reassembled it with newer work into what eventually became Bright Scarves of Hours. When the years got long, I put out a couple of self-published chapbooks and that held me over a bit, and I received steady journal acceptances all that time. I got pretty discouraged at a couple of points and some good friends, some dear poetry friends, kept me going. But what are you going to do? I’m a poet. I’m not likely to stop writing poems. I don’t want to.

I sincerely hope that when the work was good enough, the work got accepted. Madeleine L’Engle had a long dry spell after her first couple of novels, a decade I think, and the next thing she came out with was A Wrinkle in Time, so those years had a reason. But the waiting was no fun!

Now I have raised my children and over the last few years both my parents have passed away. So I feel strongly that this period of my life, however long it will be, is for me to devote to work: poetry, drama, whatever. In middle age there’s no getting around how fragile one’s sanity and physical health are. We can become unable to work at any moment. So I must work hard while I still can.

And of course I love being published. What does one bother with all this for if not to be read? Heaven knows there’s no money in it. But to be read, and understood, and connected with in that way. There is nothing like it in all the world.


Rob: Very true. What's your next plan, then, for being read? Poetry? Fiction? Theatre? A - god forbid! - break?

Diane: I never stop writing poems. I have more than a hundred unpublished poems sitting around awaiting their fate and fool that I am I keep adding to their number. And yes, I have branched out into writing for the theatre, which was my first love as a young person. Though I’m not directly working on one at the moment, I hope I’ll write more plays.

Having one produced was unbelievable. I described it as like having everyone you know all sitting in a room reading your book all at the same time, and you can see into their heads. How cool is that? And you can sell a play more than once, unlike a book, which means there might be slightly more money in it. Slightly. Because poets, we’re all about the big money, aren’t we Rob?

If you want to help Diane rake in that big poetry money, you can pick up a copy of Bonsai Love from your local bookstore, or from the Harbour Publishing website or Amazon. Or, even better, you can get a signed copy at Diane's Vancouver launch on April 27th!

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.