The Revolving City

I'm very pleased to have a poem in the new poetry anthology The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (ed. Renee Saklikar and Wayde Compton. Anvil Press, 2015). The anthology is a celebration of the work of poets who have read at SFU's Lunch Poems reading series, which is a pretty damn neat way to celebrate a reading series (something I think we don't do nearly enough of here in Vancouver). Poets who'd previously read as part of the series were invited to submit poems (mine is "The Wailing Machines" from The Other Side of Ourselves) and short commentaries on their composition.

The list of contributors is pretty wonderful:

Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli.

If you're interested in picking up a copy, the anthology is being launched this Wednesday at 5:45 PM at SFU Harbour Centre. You can get all the details here.

The anthology will also be featured at WORD Vancouver this Sunday, with an 11:30 AM spot on the Poetry Bus. You can read the whole WORD schedule here.

Thank you so much to Renee, Wayde and the rest of the Lunch Poems/Anvil Press team for making this anthology happen, and for letting me slip a poem in there!

as much as the world is willing to offer

Looking back, I think I was too green to have more than an inkling of what I was reading. But that intimation — naive, inarticulate, confounding — approached the mystical. And I’m still after that as a reader, the place where meaning shimmers like a heat-haze over the world’s everyday presence; seeming, at once, to rise from the details of our lives and to exist beyond them; to almost and nearly say who we are, and why. Which seems to be as much as the world is willing to offer by way of explanation.

- Michael Crummey, on his first encounters with poetry, from his essay "Afterwords: An Introduction to Poetry" in the Spring 2015 issue (#134) of The New Quarterly. You can read the whole (retitled) thing here.

bassackwards and geezly and paralyzed - "Waiting for the Albatross" by Sandy (and Jack) Shreve

May Day - Sandy (and Jack) Shreve

I wonder what’s going on in the world to-day.
The “storm petrels” I saw yesterday lived up to their name
and we’re rolling all over the ocean.

We got that damned rice for dessert, and stewed prunes
but the officers got apple dumplings and fancy biscuits.
I wonder what’s going on in the world to-day.

In the water alongside us, a huge shark was rolling back
and forth and every once in a while turned belly up
as we rolled all over the ocean.

Told steward about the maggots we found in our biscuits. “Fresh
meat” as they call it or no, I’d sooner starve than eat that filthy food.
I wonder what’s going on in the world to-day.

We’ve been taking some pretty bad rolls. Got a snap
of the Bon Scot heeled right over and dipping her starboard rails
with her infernal tossing and rolling.

We’ve taken several seas and lots of spray; I got caught
in one and was washed to the side.
I wonder what’s going on in the world to-day
while we’re rolling all over the ocean.

from Waiting for the Albatross
(Oolichan Books, 2015).
Reprinted with permission.

---

Interview #23 (!) on this blog and I've finally begun repeating myself. With interviewees, that is. I've been repeating the same half-baked questions for quite a while...

I couldn't think of a better person to return to than Interviewee #7 Sandy Shreve, who I first spoke with back in 2012 about an American anthology of villanelles which included one of her poems. At that point, Sandy was already well at work on what would become her fifth poetry collection, Waiting for the Albatross (Oolichan Books, 2015).

Waiting for the Albatross is a book of found poems drawn out of her father Jack Shreve's diary from his five-month trip working aboard the freighter Canadian Scottish. In it Sandy and Jack drop us into a world of depression-era hard labour, featuring fist fights and exotic ports-of-call to break up the day-to-day drudgery.

Part history, part memoir, and all poetry, Waiting for the Albatross is quite a book. Though all the words are Jack's, Sandy's style works its way in there, and you find yourself hearing two voices at once, separated by almost eighty years. A father and daughter reunited.

Sandy has two readings scheduled for WORD Vancouver (September 27th, Library Square, Vancouver):

12:30 PM, Waiting for the Albatross reading, Poetry Bus

4:30 PM, Dead Poets Reading Series reading (Reading PK Page), Poetry Bus

Full schedule here.

In anticipation of the WORD events, Sandy and I sat down to chat on all things Albatross. I hope you enjoy the result!

Sandy Shreve, with trees, auditioning to be the next Minnesota Timberwolves mascot.

---

Rob: When I first interviewed you in Spring 2012, for the Villanelles anthology, you mentioned then that you'd written a number of villanelles as part of “a sequence of 22 found-poems I crafted using fragments from a journal my father kept while working on a freighter in 1936.” And now, three years later, here you are with Waiting for the Albatross, a book of 37 found poems from your father's journal. Can you walk us through the journey from diary to sequence to book, and from 0 to 22 to 37? At what point in the process did Oolichan become involved?

Sandy: I first got the idea for the found poems when I was transcribing the diary for what turned into a family project. I produced a typed-up version of the diary that included the photos from the trip and information about Dad’s life later on, as well as tons of annotations, which I added to explain passing references to things like ‘Daddy Neptune’ (a crossing-the-equator ‘ceremony’), a supposed ‘man-eating monster’ (actually giant tortoises – that are herbivores) of the Galapagos, and so on. This got to be pretty long, so I decided to divide it into chapters – and at some point it occurred to me it might be fun to start each one with a poem I’d write using words, phrases, etc., from that particular section. In the end, I had 11 chapters and 11 poems. I sent the finished product off to everyone in the family, they all loved it, and I thought I was done.

Until a few months later, when I started getting ideas for more found poems – and another 11 poured out. What to do? I’d already printed and distributed the annotated diary… So I made a little chapbook – just 30 copies – and gave it to friends and some family members who one way or another had helped me with the family project. Now, I was done!

Except. A few months later, still more poems came knocking. In the end I had another 10 (five of the pieces in Waiting for the Albatross are prose excerpts taken straight from Dad’s journal).

Then serendipity took over. I got to talking with Randal MacNair at Word on the Street [ed. note: since renamed WORD Vancouver] that year (2012), and he told me he was starting to publish books combining poetry and photos. When I told him about what I had, he asked me to send it to him. I did, he accepted it and Oolichan produced this beautiful book.


Rob: Yes, isn't it inconveniently wonderful when the poems keep knocking? In reading Waiting for the Albatross I was struck by a sense that poems (or prose, in his case) kept knocking for your father, too. Throughout the book he always seems like the writer in the room, surrounded by drinking, womanizing, and drudgery – participating sometimes, but always right back into his room to record it all, often with a good deal of style. Were you doing the same at his age, filling notebooks with observations?

Sandy: At his age – 21 – I was on the cusp of a five-year writer’s block! But up to then I’d always written poems – terrible, teen-aged angst poems for the most part, but I was devoted to poetry and bad as the poems were, I was learning a lot about the craft from those efforts. I was never a diarist, though I’ve always had notebooks in which I scribble random thoughts and ideas that might get used in poems at some point.


Rob: Did reading the diary change the way you thought about your dad, or your relationship with him?

Sandy: When I read the diary – the first time and every time after – I recognized my father. His handwriting. His voice – oh, that voice – I could hear him, absolutely, in every word and turn of phrase. But this was a much younger version of the man I knew. I recognized his argumentative, opinionated, side; the outdoorsman; the man who loved desserts and sweets; the smoker; the storyteller – absolutely, the storyteller! But I didn’t recognize the naïve and somewhat ‘green’, young guy who was so easily shocked by the behaviour of the crew, frightened by the rough side of life on the docks, intensely shy around women… (Speaking of women – I found it interesting that he almost always used the word ‘woman’, and rarely ‘girl’. Today it’s the other way round… a lot of men seem much more comfortable with ‘girl’ than ‘woman’…)

Sandy and Jack, 1952

I know you know that losing a parent when you’re young can be tough (my Dad died when I was 14). For me, it’s been a lifelong journey, coming to terms with that loss. I’ve gone from rage at my Dad for dying – and thinking of him as an awful person – to embracing him as all but perfect. None of this is part of Waiting for the Albatross – but definitely, reading the journal did change how I thought about him. It helped me put him into perspective, get some kind of balanced view of who he really was (though I suspect I still lean toward over-admiration, toward being overly proud of him). I wrote about this aspect of the diary’s impact on me in a long poem, “Heartbeat”, in my 3rd book (Belonging, Sono Nis: 1997). That poem ends, “There is no villain here, and no saint // I touch my fingers to paper / feel at last the pulse of the ordinary human heart / of my father.”


Rob: That's really beautiful. I'll have to seek that poem out (speaking of 14, I was that age when "Heartbeat" was published. Far more "boy" than "man," that's for sure!). And yes, I agree, both about the lifelong journey and the inevitable leaning towards over-admiration. But I think we're both in a good place when we can over-admire. Others aren't so lucky.

Continuing on this theme of "looking back", I'd like to talk for a moment about the "old" forms you use in Waiting for the Albatross. As mentioned above, the book features a number of villanelles, but also a great number of other forms, especially repetitive forms. In 2012 you noted “I wanted to use [forms featuring refrains] because they seemed to me to reflect the recurring routines of life on a freighter and thus, the repetitions in Dad’s journal.” The forms were certainly successful in this regard.

Beyond the mechanics of the forms themselves, though, I felt the use of traditional forms in itself reinforced the book's project – to revive and restore a moment in history. Old forms brought forward into the present bearing old words brought forward into the present. Was this important to you?

Sandy: Oh, bringing forward those ‘old’ words and expressions Dad used – some he made up, others very much of that era – is crucial. They’re a big part of what brings the story to life. Words like “bassackwards” and “geezly” and “paralyzed” (meaning drunk); expressions like “have a look-see” and “Blue Hades”; “absolutely daffy,” “dinky die” (from New Zealand) and “jumped right clear” (still very much a Maritimes turn of phrase) – it was pure joy to work with such vivid language.

I’d like to say something, too, about the mechanics of those forms. I wasn’t really conscious of this in the writing – but more than one reader, after finishing the book, has told me that all those refrains make the poems sound very colloquial; they are so like the way people tell their stories – with lots of repetition. I love it, that the forms strike readers that way!


Rob: Do you think similar impulses drive your interest in traditional forms and your interest in history, specifically your family history?

Sandy: I’ve never made a connection between my interests – history and form poetry – so if there is a link, I’m not sure I could identify it. When I was young I almost always wrote rhymed and metred stanzas or sonnets. When I started writing poems again in the mid-70s, it was usually in free verse. My renewed interest in traditional forms didn’t really pick up again until the late 80s, when Kirsten Emmott brought a pantoum she’d written to a meeting of the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. From that moment on, I was hooked.

As to history, I’ve always been interested in it (it was my major in university), especially Canadian history. And I’ve always been drawn to what’s old; the older the better. So the minute I first picked up my Dad’s diary and letters, I loved holding them – the feel and smell of that fragile, sepia paper;
the aqua and blue fountain-pen ink, the handwriting. Partly, of course, that’s because they were my Dad’s; but also, it was just their age…

As for family history – I’m probably no more or less drawn to this than the next person; like anyone, I get pretty excited when I run across a good family story! But I don’t think of this book as family history so much as I consider it oral history from a particular era – the ‘dirty thirties’. We generally hear more, I think, about the unemployed during those years than we do about the employed. So it feels to me like an important addition to the history of that time.


Rob: I completely agree - it certainly gave a lens to a time and place that were very unfamiliar to me.

As we've been exploring, this book is not just a suite of poems, but is also a history book and a memoir. Obviously, a book of poems can be all these things simultaneously, it doesn't have to be one or another. Still, in the composition and editing process you must have faced any number of forks in the road (Do I keep something in for historical purposes, even if it clunks up the line a bit?), and now when you're on the marketing end questions must abound about where and how to promote the book. Could you talk a bit about the push and pull between poetic and historical goals? Did it feel like a tug-of-war, or was it generally more harmonious?

Sandy A bit of both, actually, Rob. At first, I wanted to include every intriguing nugget in the poems. For example, Dad or one of the crew frequently would mention, in passing, something that led me to go research it (such as workers’ deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal or the League of Nations’ oil embargo on Italy in response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia). The historian in me wanted to include it all – but I just wasn’t able to make compelling poetry out of everything. And then, there was the question of focus for the book. I think partly the reason I wasn’t able to ‘mine’ every detail that fascinated me, was that to include everything would create too many tangents, start to turn the book into a bit of a hodgepodge. So, in the end I decided to focus on what the diary itself dives into most deeply – the work the men did, the conditions they lived in, and their often volatile relationships… as I’ve said elsewhere, it covers everything ‘from sing-alongs on the poop deck to fist-fights in the foc’sle.’ Beyond that, I included a few pieces that provide context (poems like “News,” “Cargo,” “Souvenirs,” and “Stamps” for instance).

Having made that decision, it became easier to decide what to include or not based on the amount of detail Dad did or didn’t give. I wanted the poems and stories to be all in his words, his voice. So if, to make sense of a reference to something, I’d have to add my own words to his in the poem – then it didn’t make the cut. On the other hand, if I could fill in the gap with a simple note to the poem, or with a glossary entry (both are at the back of the book), then I’d try to fit it in – but even then, I wasn’t always able to come up with a poem that was good enough to keep.


Rob: When you were young, did your father ever talk about any of the people he sailed with? "Wheeler" or "William" or the Bos'n? If he did, did it help shape an image of them in your mind, and did that image clash at all with the characters as you found described in the journal?

Sandy: Really, all I remember was that he said he had this diary, and offered to let me read it. I wasn’t interested! In my fifties, when I finally did read it, I wished I’d taken him up on that offer. Had I read his diary when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have found ‘boys’ so alien and, frankly, terrifying.


Rob: Ha! I would have thought it would have had the opposite effect on you, reading about all those boys womanizing and boxing each other around the head. We all read things differently, I guess!

Speaking of which, in what ways do you think a reader's sense of your father and his time on the Canadian Scottish would be different if they read his diary directly, instead of Waiting for the Albatross? In what ways do you think it would be the same?

Sandy: I hope, essentially, there wouldn’t be a big difference. Mostly, reading the diary, readers would find out about all kinds of details, from the movies and monuments they saw while ashore to the novels they read at sea, that I couldn’t, or decided not to, include in this book. As to my father – I’m pretty sure the man you meet in Waiting for the Albatross is the same man you meet in the diary.

---

You'd be really bassackwards if you didn't pick up a copy of Waiting for the Albatross. You can do so at your local bookstore, or, if you want that albatross hanging around your neck, from Amazon.

Two Purdy Updates

Two announcements on the Al Purdy A-frame front!

First off, the A-frame trust is now accepting applications for 2017 Residencies! Applications must be postmarked by October 16th. Click here for all the info.

Also, Al Purdy Was Here, the new Purdy/A-frame documentary from Brian Johnson, is set to premiere in Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival. Shows will be on Tuesday, September 15th and Thursday, September 17th. More details here.

All of us poor bastards living outside Toronto will have to wait for our chance to see it. For now, maybe the trailer will tide us over? It's got Margaret Atwood playing pool, Pamela Wallin doing something other than walking in or out of a courtroom, and some good old fashioned deck scrubbing. What more could we need?

timor mortis

The knowledge that we will all die is a strange dark flower on the long history of human cognitive evolution. It may be the concept that more than anything else - more than the language we use to express it, more than the emotional capacity to grieve it and the episodic memory we use to recall it - marks the decisive branching of homo sapiens sapiens from our hominid ancestors. Death is what came into the garden when we ate the apple of knowledge. It came to us not as a punishment, but simply because it is the unavoidable consequence of having a certain capacity to know, to travel in time and see that we will not be alive forever. Whatever that final tweak of cognitive capacity was, we have spent the millenia since trying to incorporate the knowledge and manage the dilemma that results. How do you live a meaningful life when you know it's going to end?

...

Certainly, as a way of coping with the thought of death, we often turn to thoughts about other 'bigger' structures that may be immune to it. But we don't do this simply to bury our fear under a cortical carpet and stomp the rug down. The response is not entirely about suppression, about stopping yourself thinking about something unpleasant. It is an active response in order to resolve a situation, take control of it - because you must take steps to deal, not just with the present fear but also the future reality. The tiger will get you, so what are you going to do about it if you are not to remain paralyzed?

So some people write poems.

- Alice Major, from her essay "The Wide and Starry Sky: Falling in Love with the Poem" in the Summer 2015 (#135) issue of The New Quarterly.

Dead Poets September Lineup (+ Bonus WORD Reading)!

The next Dead Poets Reading Series event will take place at the Vancouver Public Library's Central Branch, Alice MacKay room, on September 13th, 2015, from 3-5 PM.

The lineup:

Milton Acorn (1923-1986), read by Michael Lockett
Philip Levine (1928 - 2015), read by Fiona Tinwei Lam
Don Marquis (1878 - 1937), read by Matt Whiteman
Tomas Tranströmer (1931 - 2015), read by Jeff Steudel

Attendance is free. For more info, visit our website.

Also in September, the DPRS will be participating in WORD Vancouver! We will be presenting a reading on September 27th, 2015 from 4:30-5:00 PM on the poetry bus!

The WORD reading will include:

Maya Angelou (1928 - 2014), read by Fiona Tinwei Lam
PK Page (1916 - 2010), read by Sandy Shreve
John Updike (1932 - 2009), read by Evelyn Lau

I'll be hosting the WORD reading, as well as the reading preceding it, "A Twist of Nature", which will feature Jeff Steudel, John Pass and recent silaron interviewee Elena Johnson.

So join me, maybe, on the 13th or the 27th? Or, goodness, both?

less craft than irritability

...it seems to me that when revising a poem, the most important thing one brings to the worktable is less craft than irritability. A poet can be irritated by any of several sorts of things. I just mentioned one of them: what might be called a level bump (something unexceptionable by normal lights that nonetheless affronts the ear or tongue or intelligence). The irritant can also be an inauthenticity (something which affronts nothing, but which one can’t quite hear oneself saying), an opportunity (something which is perfectly fine, but which nevertheless whispers, “I could be so much more…”). But whatever the irritant, a poet exercises something other and deeper than craft when responding to it.

(I’m not saying there’s no such thing as craft in the process of revision. If that were the case, there would be no such thing as editors. I’m just saying there’s an aspect of revision to whose mysteriousness the term “craft” seems inadequate.)

- Daniel Brown, from his essay "Craft Schmaft", over at the Partisan site. You can read the whole thing here.

the absurdity that reads as funny

I think none of the speakers in this book are anything I would call real, even those closest to myself. I’m interested in the ideas and feelings that pull against each other, and this interest tends to militate against cohesion or consistency in the poems. At the same time, I hate the idea of randomness and meaninglessness! So I think the tragicomic note you’re hearing is me struggling to reconcile a seemingly cruelly random world with my own need for order and structure. If there is an omniscient maker of these poems, that speaker is still not omnipotent—-you can know a lot without being able to control much of anything. So the extent to which the maker can set up the world of a poem is limited by the inherent contrariness of reality and of language. I wouldn’t say that my poems stage a weirdness, exactly—I think the materials of life just *are* quite weird. The absurdity that reads as funny isn’t something that I’d say I go in search of—-it’s something I’d say I’m perpetually trying to wrestle into some kind of sense. I don’t see being funny as an end in itself.

- Linda Besner, discussing her collection The Id Kid with Susan Gillis, over on Susan's Concrete & River blog. You can read the whole thing here.

hello flowers! - "Transmitter and Receiver" by Raoul Fernandes

When The Teeth of the Gears Meet - Raoul Fernandes

the music chimes, the bicycle
climbs the hill, the clock releases
a bird. The streetlight blinks, goes night
day night day night. My bed
is a giant reset button I hold down
until morning. When the teeth
of the dream meets the teeth of the morning
I pour myself a cup of numbers in the kitchen.
Daydream a wheel inside a wheel. Daydream
children running from the shore with cupped
phosphorescence that dies out before
they reach us. Rushing back to do it again.
And I am a child running towards myself
and the teeth of the memory meet the teeth
of the day meet the clock, the highway, the heart.
Or the gears don't touch, just spin like ceiling fans.
What's a day? asks the sun. What's night?
asks the moon. Will you send me
that beautiful book about asteroids?
I want my life to change.

from Transmitter and Receiver
(Nightwood Editions, 2015).
Reprinted with permission.

---

What can I say about Raoul Fernandes and his debut collection Transmitter and Receiver? First of all, I'm compromised as all hell: Raoul and I are good friends, and I have adored his writing for a very long time. The first thing I did when I was hired as Poetry Editor at PRISM international was to solicit two poets: Elise Partridge and Raoul, and the issue in which they both appeared still stands as my favourite. When Raoul was hemming and hawing about completing and mailing out his first manuscript I told him if he waited too long I'd found a press and put it into print myself. I assume he thought I was joking, but I still kick myself for not doing it.

To my mind, Raoul Fernandes' poems hit the sweetspot between being grounded and afloat, accessible and challenging, funny and necessarily (have you noticed our world?) stark, better than any being written today - and through it all his poems have this goddamn enormous, generous, beating heart which you can hear from the other side of the city. They're good, is what I'm saying. Which has made it all the more joyous an experience to watch Raoul's first collection, Transmitter and Receiver (Nightwood Editions, Spring 2015) go out into the world and start to receive the praise and attention it deserves.

I sat down with Raoul, a guitar, a hipster-mason-jar full of wine, a hipster-railway-conductor-shirt, and a Scategories game. We talked all things Transmitter and Receiver: flowers, the suburbs, universal cheeseburgers, disgruntled trees, electronic music and flowers. I hope you enjoy!

Don't even get me started on the hipster-velour-chair, Raoul.

---

Rob: With a book called Transmitter and Receiver I expected a lot of technology to have worked its way into your poems. And its certainly there in abundance - video games and YouTube videos, .jpgs and cell phone ring tones. But just as prevalent, perhaps more so, are flowers - in the foreground in poems like "The Tulip Vending Machine" and "Flower Arrangements" and also popping up in little cameos, like the night flowers which "open with ease // in the politician's garden" or the "soft buzzing" of flowers on an otherwise silent morning. I was wondering if you could speak about these two themes in your book - modern technology and flowers - and how they compliment and contrast one another. What does it mean for you when you put flowers in a poem? Could you imagine writing this book with the tech in but not the flowers?

Raoul: It's funny, I had absolutely no idea I had put that many flowers in the book until it was too late. It's like some little imp came in when I was sleeping and pressed them all in. But yes – and let's say that imp is a subconscious part of me – I have a few explanations. On a purely associative level, I like that sweet note that flowers can play and to use that to disrupt or enhance something in a poem. I have also felt distant or suspicious of something so purely beautiful when I was a moody and dark youth. That skateboarder in "Flower Arrangements" that holds the bouquet at a “precise distance” away from himself? That's me, in a way. Just overwhelmed and unable to relate to that beauty. I remember a period later when I was reading a lot of Gerald Stern, who has flowers in his poems, and how startling it was to me, somehow. At the time a flower poem to me was the most radical thing. And then of course, I relate them a lot to my wife these days, she's brought me into a quiet kind of appreciation of them and living green things in general.

As far as the technology goes, I think I was being playful with contrasts, mostly. I was trying to show the organic nature of technology as much as I was trying to place the flowers in unusual contexts as well. Flowers are a cliché right? But it's also a fun game to try to un-cliché an old cliché.


Rob: Yes, I also love the challenge of un-cliché-ing clichés. Unflowering flowers?

Sticking with the recurring themes of the book, another of them seems to me to be commodification, especially commodification within a suburban setting. Flowers and food are turned into products, and thereby deformed. In "Affordable Travel Through Time" a group of teenagers hangs out in front of a rotating billboard and the speaker notes reverently that "Nothing / was purchased tonight and nothing sold." What was your sense of the commodified world as a suburban teenager growing up in Tsawwassen, BC, and has it changed as you've aged and moved into the city?

Raoul: This is an area I feel very out of my depth on, but I will try to circle around it. It might help if I talked about that moment in the poem you mentioned. I was looking back at a time where I, like probably a lot of young people, was struggling to find a meaningful framework for my identity and life, something authentic or even spiritual. And around me, things like movies, shopping malls, advertising seemed to force a meaning onto us that we didn't want or at least, were very suspicious of. It was important to find meaning outside that, even though we didn't know what it was.

Some poems might also relate to the “thingness" I was just talking about. In a poem, does something become more real, more of a specific thing when it's placed in a dollar store or a vending machine? But being a mass-produced object, it loses uniqueness, so it becomes less real in a way, too. And another quality is that a mass-produced object is something shared, like when we drink a can of coke are we all connecting to the same object, just in different places? Confusing, right? Again, I feel out of my depth and I think I'm often just using it as a texture, not making any statements about it, but knowing when it feels right. Maybe you'd be able to help get a better grip on what I'm doing here.


Rob: I suppose I'm projecting my own experience on to your poems a bit, but as a child of Vancouver's suburbs myself, now living in the city, I feel that my geographic location changes my sense of the commodified world. In the suburbs, growing up, and even now when I return to visit family, I feel awash in a world that is made up of possessions, where the value of "things" comes in the buying and selling and hoarding of them, and where the purpose of existence is the acquisition of the best and most desired items: megahouses and massive shopping mall parking lots full of minivans and Hummers. Then I compare that to the city where, certainly, there is hyper-consumerism in many areas, but also so much resistance to it, resistance I never felt in the suburbs, where consumerism felt like a warm blanket pulled over the lot of us. Maybe it has more to do with childhood/adulthood than suburb/city - I'm not entirely sure.

Though ours is hardly a unique experience - growing up in the suburbs, then moving to the big city - it isn't a universal one, either. I felt in many of the poems in Transmitter and Receiver you used this perspective to take on questions like "What is a thing?", "What is its worth?" and "In what currency is that worth measured?". In these poems, a knowing, urban speaker looks back on their unknowing, suburban upbringing, and some insight or another is cracked open via the comparison. For instance, your poem "Night School", which faces "Affordable Travel Through Time" - busing into the city looking for something, some answer or perspective the suburb couldn't provide, something not found by the speaker until they'd made the move both into the city and into adulthood. Then there's "Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels", which I think you were hinting at above, where the speaker eats a fast food cheeseburger, emboldened by the fact that "maybe tens of thousands" are "experiencing this identical flavour / and texture at this precise time" while also noting that actually enjoying the meal is not important. How much more of a tangled suburban love song can one sing?

Do you find being in the suburbs substantially - let's say, hesitantly, "spiritually" - different for you when it comes to how you see and understand the "thingness" of the world, compared to the city? And how, if at all, do you think your upbringing shaped the questions you now find yourself asking about "thingness"?

Raoul: Goodness, what a question! Well, yes, the suburbs do feel that way now, the warm consumerist blanket of possessions, beautiful lawns, two car garages. Such a privileged and unsustainable ideal. I don't know if going out into the city was to consciously get away from consumerism in particular (though you're right, the city is a less materialist place and, in general, people are more conscious about these issues) but it was to go somewhere more noisy and unsettling, to shake us out of that safe and sedated feeling.

There's a line from that Night School poem, “Friends who appeared / like giants by our town's driftwood fires, now slapped / pale and diminished in this crowded light.” There was a shift in proportion when we were in the city, we felt smaller, and I think it was important to me to feel small at times. We also attempted this kind of disruption within the suburbs too - experimenting with mind-altering substances, staying awake all night at the beach, hanging out in cemeteries, etc. Music, art, books were also part of this. I didn't know what my values were but I had resistance to it being money and possessions. Now I suspect what was important was connecting with people. Friendship is a strong theme, I believe, in those suburban poems. And the later poems explore connections with strangers and those close to me, my wife and child. Sometimes it's through objects, but the objects themselves aren't where the values lie.


Rob: Yes, I like that a lot. Especially the smallness part - the city is good for that. Sometimes too good. I'm wondering, as we talk about life being about friendships before objects, how you feel about peddling a book of your poems (in, say, author interviews) as a commercial item. Do you feel any tension there?

Raoul: It might be me being biased, but I weirdly don't feel much tension when it comes to books as commodified things in the world. Books seem kind of empty in a way, like vehicles for thought to be transmitted through, only existing when they are being written and when being read. Of course, it is also a bound physical object you can hold in your hand and a lot of disgruntled trees would have something to say about this somewhat romantic metaphysical idea.

As far as marketing goes, I'm pretty easy about it so far. I'd feel weird if there was marketing extraneous to the poems. Most of the time it's the poems speaking for themselves (at a reading or on a bus ad), or some reaction or discussion of the poems (in an interview or review) so it feels ok to me.

Raoul, blinking, wearing the coat from a skinned corduroy sofa.

Rob: "You have this thing" are the opening words to the opening poem of the book ("By Way of Explanation"). Then again, two pages later, we come upon "this strong coffee, this pulsing sky" ("Bioluminescence"). "This" is a showcase word in Transmitter and Receiver, a word returned to again and again, and it seems to me that the centrality of "this" in the book suggests a bond you feel with the reader. The reader is there in the world of the poem with you and you are giving them a tour: it's not just some random burger, it's "this burger, this popular fast food cheeseburger" ("Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels"). You can almost reach out and pick it up in your hands. Why do you think you are drawn to "this" instead of "the" or "a" in so many circumstances?

Raoul: That's a really good observation. Again, something I haven't consciously noticed. I like it, I wouldn't mind a lot of my poems feeling like an intimate show and tell session. I like to bring the reader into the room of the poem, into the specific moment. There's already so much in poems that risk distancing the reader or suggesting that objects in the poems are only symbols for something else. Sometimes it's good to be clear on the actual thingness. Which is funny because I think I use the word “thing” often too, which is vague. So “this thing” is both specific and vague at the same time.


Rob: How, if at all, do you think your work as Goodnight Streetlight (and/or electronic music generally) informs your poetry? Vice versa?

Raoul: When I first started making electronic music it was very playful and exploring, building little songs with whatever pieces of sounds I found around, from little Windows system bleeps to recorded ambient noises, to fiddling on a toy keyboard. One could make parallels to how I approach the data of my poems in the same way. Feeling out what's within reach, then putting odd things next to each other and seeing what energy they produce. Also, people have used similar adjectives to describe my music: weird/dreamy/comforting. So that reveals something of my aesthetic. I just hope there's a little bit of discomfort in there as well.


Rob: In reading the book it felt largely chronological: suburban teenage life at the front, family life with wife and son near the end. How much does that order line up with the order in which you wrote the poems? Have you found you've written about certain periods in your history at particular times in your life? What parts/times of your life did you start writing about first?

Raoul: I tend to go back to my suburban teenage life a lot for material. Not sure why, it was a crazy intense time where I was trying to figure out both myself and the world. I was hanging out with a lot of weird kids who were in a similar position, feeling crazy and different yet existing in this very safe well-manicured pretty little town. I enjoyed that contrast. I've revisited that weird suburbia often and will continue to go back there I think. I didn't write any of those poems during that time though, I should say.

The family domestic poems are a bit newer where I'm consciously trying to write something more current. It's more of a challenge, in as far as I use memories at all, I usually need the memories to age a bit.


Rob: Similar to my last question, I'm wondering if any of these poems were written late in the publication process, maybe to fill holes in the manuscript, and if so, which, and what were the perceived holes? Having seen and read your book in print, did it inspire you to tackle anything different in book number two?

Raoul: Regarding the newer poems in the book, I found the natural thing to do was to continue to write poems after the manuscript was accepted and then choose the ones I felt were playing different notes than the other poems, but somehow still connected to the themes. I don't know if there were obvious holes, but I remember having a worry that there were too many poems that had the same feel, that used the same images (hello flowers!) or ended the same way.

I haven't really started anything for another collection, but I think I'm going to just keep writing and let new poems grow organically and hopefully explore new terrain, voices, approaches. Maybe (probably) get deeper with some of the concerns that are already in this book. So no real plan, but I like the idea of working on a few little chapbooks instead of the somewhat daunting prospect of Book Number Two. I want to give myself the freedom to take risks and get a little weird. Whatever keeps my head lit up.

---

Raoul is Transmitting like crazy, so make sure you Receive a copy of Transmitter and Receiver soon. You can tune one in from your local bookstore, or from the Nightwood Editions website, or, if you wish to worship at the grand temple of commodification, via Amazon.

using the tools at hand - "Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra" by Elena Johnson

Spines - Elena Johnson

spine of the sky
 spine of the sparrow


   spine of the sheep’s horn
    spine of the antler


       spine of footsteps over tundra
        spine of white plastic


          spine of unknowing


           spine of modern research
           spine of the lilting shack


           spine of the black spruce
          spine of the pika


         spine of the 21st-century human


     spine of a caribou 
    settling into the scree  

from Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra
(Gaspereau Press, 2015).
Reprinted with permission.

---

Elena Johnson's Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is to the Canadian poetry world as a marmot is to the Alpine Tundra. I don't think I need to explain how the world of CanPo is like a barren tundra, do I? But Field Notes being a marmot might take a minute.

Ok, so you've got a big empty expanse, right? Lots of scrub plants and stubby trees clinging to the sides of rocks and such, the wind howling. And occasionally there's a big, flashy animal making itself known: some proud caribou or robust mountain sheep or a grizzly bear taking swipes at its neighbours. They insist on being the stars of the show. But then you hear this little sound every once and a while, this little whistle, and you know something else is busy at work, too. You just can't see it yet.

Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is that marmot hiding in the rocks while all the bigger creatures lumber by. It has been living in the CanPo tundra for years (originally composed in 2008), and you've heard or spotted it from time to time, as when excerpts or earlier versions of the book were longlisted for a CBC Literary Award in 2010 and shortlisted for the Alfred G. Bailey Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2013. But it took until Spring 2015 for you to spot it in all its glory, when it was published by Gaspereau Press.

Slight in stature (48 pages with all the paratextual padding), narrow in scope (exclusively focused on Elena's short visit to a field research project in the Yukon), and composed using stripped-down language to match its subject, the book could easily slip your attention. Don't let it. An attentive, meditative look at wildness and how we can and cannot lasso it (in words; in graphs and charts), it's a book to read and return to, to dip into when you need a refreshing jolt, like stepping into a cold stream.

I hiked into the Alpine Tundra and waited for Elena and her little marmot to arrive. It took many months of waiting, but Elena had taught me to be patient. When they finally appeared, I asked Elena a few questions about Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra, and the results are below. I hope you enjoy!

Elena Johnson, in her blue period.

---

Rob: Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra is a series of poems composed in 2008 during your time as writer-in-residence with a field research project in the Yukon. Could you speak a little about the residency? How did you find out about it?

Elena: I had applied for a job back in 2006 to work as a field ecology researcher at the Kluane Alpine Ecosystem Project’s field camp in the Yukon’s Ruby Range. I ended up taking another job that summer instead, but I kept wondering about this remote mountain range in the Yukon. It occupied my imagination for several years. In 2008, after the first year of my master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, I had the great luck of having some free time to travel in the summer, and wrote a proposal asking to visit the camp as their writer-in-residence, in exchange for assisting with some field research (and doing my share of cooking, etc.). A close friend of mine who had worked at the camp for many years vouched for my abilities as a backpacker, researcher, writer, and generally likeable human being. The proposal was accepted. I was helicoptered in with the food supplies, and I hiked out at the end of my stay.


Rob: Did you have any hesitations about taking on the project? Was there ever a point during those weeks when you found yourself questioning or regretting your choice to attend?

Elena: On the day I was supposed to hike down toward the treeline and head home, I got lost. It was a foggy day, and I was with someone who knew the way. But because there was a dead sheep on the usual trail, which meant the grizzly that had killed it was likely still in the area, we had to take an alternate route. No one would lend us a map. (There were only two topographic maps at the camp, so they were valuable.) So we ended up on a mountainside, in a dense fog, not sure where or how we’d taken a wrong turn. I had a compass, notebook and pencil in my pocket, so we drew a rough map of where we’d come from and marked the last place we were certain we’d been. Then we attempted to retrace our steps back to that area. Luckily, we found our way. When the fog cleared a bit, we had already made our way – roughly – back toward camp. At that point, we were very close to the trail with the dead sheep – exactly the area we were supposed to be avoiding! All that to say that on that particular day I imagined a helicopter search and hoped they’d find us alive. But even during that incident, I didn’t regret being there. I did attempt a poem about this experience of being lost in the fog, but it simply wasn’t a good poem. There are hints of this experience in the book, though – a line or stanza here and there. And there is a poem about the dead sheep.

I’m someone who loves to camp and travel, so I’m accustomed to roughing it. A more precious person would have had a hard time in these conditions – no bathing, unless you could jump into an icy creek or get the cook-tent to yourself for a half hour and heat a pot of water; cold temperatures; sleeping in a shared tent; etc. But I loved it. Well, I guess a bath or shower would have been nice.

Field Notes, in its animal form.
Photo © Elena Johnson

Rob: Yes, I remember that poem - the "Dead Sheep Valley". The way that image of the dead sheep ("Bear-marks / in its flank") jumps out of the poem, leads me to think about one of the most arresting qualities of the poems in Field Notes. The language is so spare and stripped down, mirroring the landscape. But then one flashy word suddenly appears in a poem and it shines like it never would in a different collection - like wild flowers, or a small mammal springing up among the stones, or a dead sheep out of nowhere with a claw slash through its side.

I wonder if you chose this sparse, stripped down writing style consciously when writing these poems, or if it came about naturally, in response to the landscape?

Elena: Thanks for this insightful description of the poems. Nearly all of the poems were written in the mountains (the Ruby Range), and I think the setting – the terrain itself – did have a big influence on the shape and style of the poems. But it wasn’t a conscious decision – as always, I just picked up a pencil and scrawled some lines into a notebook. I’ve noticed, over time, that the size of the pages of the notebooks I’m writing in affects the forms of the poems in both subtle and direct ways, and I think that principle was at work here, too – I had tiny notebooks that fit into my pockets, and one wider notebook. As for the language, I think I was just using the tools at hand – the vocabulary of the people around me, and the phrases my brain put together as I observed what was around me.


Rob: I've noticed that for myself, too - that the size of notebook can affect the shape of the final poem. How do your non-Field Notes poems, written (I assume) in notebooks of all shapes and sizes, differ from these? Is your stylistic approach the same?

Elena: I don’t have a consistent stylistic approach. My approach to poetry is always evolving. So my non-Field Notes poems are very varied – in theme, style, tone, voice, diction.... Some are quite sparse and small, like these, some are lists, like some of these, but others are very narrative and some are experimental. Found poems pop up now and then in the other collections I’m working on, as they do in this one. I’ve also been writing haiku and tanka for many years, and people have pointed out that there is a haiku-like feel to some of my other work. Another ongoing influence is my interest/background in ecology. I suppose a consistent element in my work is that it’s often a response to a geographic environment, whether urban or rural; the poems tend to have a clear setting, rather than being abstract or language-based. (And yet I enjoy reading work that is abstract and language-based.)


Rob: In reading Field Notes, I was reminded of a number of other books in which the poet reports from a remote part of Canada, such as Al Purdy's North of Summer (especially poems like "Trees at the Arctic Circle") or Anna Swanson's The Night Also and its suite of poems about her time in an Alberta fire lookout. Did any books (poetry or otherwise), or particular poems, serve as inspirations or guides for you in writing these poems? Did you look to any titles in particular when considering how to compile the poems as a book?

Elena: I did bring a few books with me on this trip, and I remember that one of them was by Charles Simic. But I don’t think you can comb through and find any Simic influences in here. I don’t remember which other books I brought along, but I know that none of them were Northern-themed. When I camp and travel, I like to photocopy a few pages from many different books and bring those – it’s a mini collection that is light to carry and can be put to other uses (scrap paper, tinder, etc.) if necessary.

When I got back home, it took a while to type up what was in my notebooks and see what was working. As I started to shape the poems into a series, I did look to some other collections. I remember that I read much of Gary Snyder’s Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems. While Snyder’s poems didn’t resonate directly with my own work, his translations of Han Shan (Cold Mountain Poems) did. There was one passage I copied down and tacked to my wall, and I included that passage as the postscript in Field Notes.

I also looked to some other poets’ collections to see how they had incorporated a long series of poems into a more assorted collection. (I originally thought Field Notes would be just one section of book, so was trying to figure out how to structure a collection around it.) While I was in the final editing stages this fall, I read some of Paulette Jiles’ writing on her time in Northern Ontario, including the poetry collection Celestial Navigation; I loved a lot of it, but I don’t think it had an influence on these poems, especially because the locale – and community – she was writing about were so different from where I was. And several writers have noticed that there might be a Kroetsch influence in these poems, but I hadn’t read his work at all until these poems were finished.

I should mention that one of these poems was included in Arc Poetry Magazine’s North-themed issue in the winter of 2013. If anyone reading this interview is interested in poetry about – or from – the North, that issue contains a lot of incredible work. There are so many amazing poets in it, many of whom live in Northern communities. The issue’s out of print now, but available in libraries.


Rob: I love that idea of reading poems and then using them to start fires! The poems in Field Notes... prepare yourself... really "caught fire" themselves - they were longlisted for the CBC Literary Awards in 2010, and were part of larger manuscripts that were shortlisted for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize in 2012 and 2013. In other words, these poems have been garnering acclaim, and bouncing around from one arrangement/manuscript to another for quite some time now. Can you speak a little about the journey the poems took from original composition to the final product as a full-length collection?

Elena: This series of poems remained fairly unchanged between 2010 and its publication date (2015). But it took me a while to gather my confidence and start sending it around to publishers. The changes that were made to these poems were fairly minor: deleting a word here or there, or taking out unnecessary passages – mostly whittling and reordering.


Rob: Connected to the above, Field Notes is just barely long enough (48 pages with all its paratexts and a good amount of white space) to qualify as a full length "book" by Canada Council standards. How do you feel about that? Did you have any desire to add poems to the series to pad it out?

Elena: I’ll admit I did feel a bit shy about putting a smallish book out into the world, especially for my first collection. This work was originally part of a longer collection that included a variety of other poems not related to this series – travel poems and urban poems, for example. It was my editor at Gaspereau Press, Andrew Steeves, who suggested that we try splitting the collection in two and giving the Alpine Tundra poems their own book. When I put my ego aside, I could see that he was right – I had basically folded two books into one, and the Alpine Tundra series was really distinct from my other work. And, deep down, I had always wanted these poems to have their own book – I just didn’t realize that there were enough poems. 48 pages seemed the right size for this collection; in the end, I actually had a few extra alpine tundra poems that we just didn’t have room for.


Rob: Do you have a general preference when you're reading towards shorter or longer collections?

Elena: As a reader, I enjoy both short and long collections. But I do find that 70 or 90 pages can feel a bit long if the book is exploring just one main theme. Friends of mine (poets and non-poets) have mentioned that the small size of this collection appeals to them – they feel that they can potentially read it in one sitting, or that they’re not overwhelmed/intimidated by the idea of reading a whole book of poetry, cover to cover.


Rob: I'm glad you mentioned Andrew Steeves and Gaspereau. As I read your book, which includes some charts and tables from the scientific research the project was undertaking, I was struck by how it seemed perfectly suited to Gaspereau, who are known for not just publishing great writing, but making physical books that are works of art in themselves. Were all of the graphs and maps in the book already a part of it when you submitted it to Gaspereau, or were some of them added later?

Elena: All but two of the graphs, maps and other visuals were already in the manuscript when I first sent it to Gaspereau. Two of them were added in later, during the year between signing the contract and beginning the final edits. I had some time that year to take a new look at the manuscript, and wrote to the camp’s head researcher to see if he had any graphs that illustrated certain ideas/findings I was hoping to incorporate into the text. He sent a few, and two of them fit in quite perfectly.

One of the things I’ve really appreciated about working with Gaspereau, and specifically with Andrew Steeves, the editor, is that he sees, in the same way I do, that these visuals are poems in themselves. I think he sees the true beauty in, say, the illustrations of the cross-sections of willow stems. Not all editors would be open to including these scientific charts and illustrations.


Rob: More generally, how, if at all, did working with Gaspereau change your expectations for what the book was, and what it could be?

Elena: As I mentioned above, the biggest change the book underwent (and this was just a few months before publication), was being split in two. I’m so glad to have been working with an editor who could see that these poems needed a book of their own. The other change was that I sent Andrew some of my photographs from my time in the Yukon, with the thought that perhaps he’d like to base a line-drawing on one of them for the cover of the book. Instead, he chose to use two of the photos in the book itself – one as the cover, and one as a two-page spread at the front of the book.

I felt the book was in good hands, and that was a great comfort during the editing and production processes. Gary Dunfield and Andrew did such a beautiful job with the book. Even the typeface was so thoughtfully chosen. I feel pretty honoured to have worked with them.


Rob: Have you shown these poems to members of the research team you accompanied? If so, did you have any trepidation doing so, and what was their response? If not, do you plan on sending them a copy of the book?

Elena: I sent an early draft to one of the head researchers a few years ago, to make sure it all made sense from a scientific standpoint. And I sent a copy last summer to the professor in charge of the field camp, with the same intention: to make sure it made sense, and that I hadn’t misrepresented any of the science.

At this point, they’ve both received their copies of the finished book, and have sent words of delight my way. It means so much to me that they love the poems, and the book. They were open to having a poet at their camp, having no idea what would come of it. It goes without saying that I couldn’t have written this book without their support.

Elena's shadow still haunts
the Alpine Tundra.
Photo © Elena Johnson

Researchers – mostly biologists and ecologists – were coming and going from the camp during the weeks that I was there. We had a group of 6-8 people at any point in time. Because the group kept changing, I wasn’t able to thank them all by name in the acknowledgements at the back of the book. But I am so thankful to each one of them: they cooked for me and ate what I cooked, they made sure I knew where to watch out for bears, they took me along on their field studies (including marmot-trapping and plant-counting), they made good coffee, and they reminded me to spend time writing poems. They even made me a card when I left – a crayon drawing on a folded sheet of printer paper. While the poems have an alone-in-the-wilds feeling, there was definitely a social element to my time in the mountains. Even if I spent the day alone, I was happy to have supper with these folks at the end of the day.

In one of the nearly-final versions of the book, I made a sweeping dedication: to all the scientists who dedicate their lives to the study and protection of northern ecosystems. The dedication was perhaps a little much, and was edited out; I simply thanked this specific research team in my acknowledgements. But I do feel this work is dedicated, more broadly, to field scientists in general, and especially those who focus on northern ecosystems.

---

Make sure you corner a copy of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra and pluck it from the scree. You can do so from your local bookstore, or from the Gaspereau Press website, or, if you wish to gut the book industry as a grizzly does a sheep, via Amazon.