12 or 20 (second series) questions with Cathy Stonehouse

Cathy Stonehouse (she/they) is a poet, writer, teacher and visual artist in Vancouver, BC. The author of a novel, The Causes, a collection of short fiction, Something About the Animal, and two previous collections of poetry—Grace Shiver and The Words I Know. Stonehouse co-edited the ground-breaking anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood and is a former editor of EVENT magazine. They teach creative writing and interdisciplinary expressive arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book didn't change my life in the ways I naively expected it might (i.e. entirely positively!). It was amazing, but also emotionally complicated. In fact, being published freaked me out so much I went silent for 15 years, and I've been trying to reduce this effect with each book since. I'm getting there. My most recent work, as a whole, is very different from my previous work, in that I'm moving toward a more comfortably capacious and interdisciplinary voice. I'm finally getting into my stride. A bit late, but hey ho.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry has always been my first love. Sound, rhythm and musicality are everything to me, even in prose. As a child I liked to read poems aloud even if I didn't understand what they meant. Writing poems can feel like how I imagine being able to sing really well might feel (an experience I only have in dreams, then wake up). Whenever I write prose I look forward to the stage when I can relate to the words and sentences as music again, i.e. when editing. I also start prose like this, but in the middle it's a heck of a lot of other work.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It can take a very long time for me to finish a project, although I have new ideas constantly. Work is often in my brain and/or notebooks for years before I have the space & time to manifest it, and sometimes revisions come after decades. This new book's main spine, the section called Dream House, came very fast one summer (2018) after returning home from the UK having rapidly emptied my mother's house. The rest of the book took a lot longer.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I work more and more in a long form--the sequence, the book-length work--even with poetry and short stories. I get a kind of "feeling" of the work as a whole, then figure out the components.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love giving readings and would love to do more of them. As a neurodivergent introvert I get very nervous but once I read and listen to others read it's quite exhilarating.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

It changes from book to book. With the new book (Dream House) I'm trying to use metaphor and other figurative language to render experiences of embodiment. How to address the trickiness of language which supposedly mediates isolation, yet so rapidly becomes cliché, and which, shortly after naming something, often begins to mean something else? The interiority and exteriority of language, of structure, and of the poem. The difference between a home and a house. Are these questions current? I don't know.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I believe that consciously making language new, or using it in new and precise ways, is critically important right now, as is tracking and recording the experience of human consciousness--because these are all practices which cannot be carried out by AI. Humans may be on the verge of losing or downloading their capacity to think and imagine, both in pictures and in language, if we are not careful (and we generally aren't). For these ancient practices to continue to emerge from the individual and collective human body we need artists, poets, musicians, dancers and thinkers. We also need arts funding, education and mentoring.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both. Essential, if I had to choose--being well edited is a deeply affirming if chastening experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don't get too attached to how the work is received, positively, negatively or not at all. Just keep doing the work and delivering it up, even if it's just to yourself.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

Too easy, perhaps. It's very bad for building a career because you dodge the branding process and can appear to be starting over each time, even if the work is all very connected. But for me each genre provides a particular challenge and opportunity, and they feed each other. Also, I'm a Gemini.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I have no real routine when I'm working (teaching) and even just living (parenting, dog-parenting, being a person in the world) but when I can I work best first thing in the morning. That's the magical time.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I've been doing a lot of painting and drawing in the past few years and I find this tremendously helpful as a way to keep my creative practice alive when language and the literary feel too hard to enter. Painting is incredibly hard but in a completely different way so it's very refreshing. Life drawing is also great because there's no time to think, just do.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Warm toast, fresh ink and wet, slightly mildewy clothing.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Lately science has been inspirational to me. When I say science I really mean nature, humility, looking, and in particular the work of Indigenous and other scholars and artists whose worldview is based on reciprocity and relationship.  Madhur Anand, Leanne Simpson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Suzanne Simard, Timothy Morton ...

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Leslie Marmon Silko--especially the novels, Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. All kinds of poets especially those working in longer forms. Lately, any amount of Will Alexander. Trans writing, writing about neurodivergence--anything that troubles the edges and binaries, undoes the commodification of art or identity. Tove Jansson's Moominvalley in November. I reread it once every year.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I'm working on writing and illustrating a graphic memoir, so that would be one thing.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I may have begun in visual art and drifted into writing instead of vice versa. Once upon a time I wanted to cross the Atlantic single-handed but I have terrible motion sickness; I also wanted to be an activist but I'm no good on committees.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Being silenced as a child.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Film: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about photographer Nan Goldin. Book: Was It for This by Hannah Sullivan.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Aforementioned graphic memoir; a collection of linked short stories I've been working on for a decade; some very "challenging" essays; a speculative novel set in the English Civil War; another poetry-ish book about the nervous system and the ecosystem. A painting of elephants.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Fraser

Michael Fraser is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition. The Day-Breakers (Biblioasis 2022) is his third poetry collection.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

There was the natural sense of immense accomplishment which immeasurably boosts one’s confidence to the stratosphere! It’s essentially impossible to truly describe that raw visceral and unprecedented glow you have when you see your name on the cover of your first book. It changed my life because it fully affirmed my place among the poetry community. Family, friends, and work colleagues also began to respect my writing endeavours if they hadn’t previously. My most recent book, The Day-Breakers, explores the experiences of African-Canadians who fought in the American Civil War which is vastly different from my first book, The Serenity of Stone, which was an amalgamation of my various life experiences up to that point. My most recent poems (that aren’t it book form) range from gauging the zeitgeist of current African-Canadian media representations to a series of ekphrastic poems, to travel poems, to current life experiences. My current poems are stylistically different from earlier work! I eschewed punctuation, capital letters, and upper case “I” in my first book, The Serenity of Stone. Punctuation emerged in my second book, To Greet Yourself Arriving, and has remained. I explore a wide range of subject matter, but at my core, I consider myself more Confessional than anything else.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My journey to poetry is quite a remarkably unlikely one. I was born in Grenada. My mom had an opportunity to work as a domestic in Canada and left me with my godmother when I was one. I came to Toronto when I was five. I grew up in an abusive environment and subsequently was a violent child in a rough neighbourhood. I knew how to open doors with a credit card when I was six and constantly stole chips and chocolate bars from variety stores until I was caught. I was placed in a “special” class at school and was proud of my fighting skills. Luckily, we moved to Edmonton when I was seven. I was supposed to start grade two at Our Lady of Mount Carmel but was illiterate and combative. They literally moved my desk from the grade two class into the grade one class. Thus, I failed grade one. It was Catholic school and I spent roughly an hour each day learning to read with nuns! Yes, nuns saved my life! We returned to Toronto when I was 14. I started writing poems for my crushes, completely unrequited of course. My high school English teacher suggested I join James Deahl’s poetry workshop at the public library, and that’s how my poetic journey commenced.

I remember showing up with photocopies of my poems which were summarily ripped to shreds during the workshopping process. It took every ounce of courage and fortitude to return the following week, but I did, and that’s when I truly took my first incipient steps towards become a poet. Poets Judith Stuart and Jennifer Footman were also workshop members and their workshop suggests quickly advanced my knowledge and poetic skills. James Deahl was my first mentor and he literally introduced me to the contemporary poetry world. I learned about literary journals, quarterlies, contests, and how to submit to journals. I attended my first poetry readings and was introduced to the likes of: Allan Briesmaster, Heather Cadsby, Maria Jacobs, Beverley Daurio, Donna Langevin, Pam Oxendine, Roo Borson, Kim Maltman, Libby Scheier, and so many others. In retrospect, I was ridiculously lucky to have James Deahl as my guide and sagacious poetic guru. He had lived with Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn Macewen when he was younger. Talk about being surrounded by genius! I must confess it took me a few months before I attended Deahl’s library workshop. I was 17 and foolish. I arrived just prior to the last few sessions. My poetic journey would have been drastically different or nonexistent without Deahl’s library workshop!

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It doesn’t take long to commence a planned writing project. I’ll usually begin once the notion is conceived. Some writing projects are accidental in nature. For example, I initially wrote four Civil War poems before I conceived of an actual writing project of Civil War poems. My writing pace is contingent on the specific poem I’m writing. Some poems magically appear as if gifted by the Muse and others are laborious. I find I’ve become naturally more efficient at editing while I compose initial drafts. Thus, I require less drafts than when I was younger.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Again, it’s all contingent on the poem. Some are derived from ideas, images, experiences, news stories, poetry prompts, etc. Even when composing a book, the individual poems will have their own unique origins.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

This is a fascinating question. I’m always nervous prior to readings, however, I do enjoy them, and view them as necessary. I’ve actually developed a slight trepidation towards readings since the advent of Covid, online readings, and the taping of online readings. Anything can happen in the online environment. I even witnessed a an online reading that was unfortunately hacked in real-time. Also, blunders and pratfalls are there forever. I personally experienced this when introducing a poet once. We were both students in the same university workshop course over 30 years ago! Our memories of the instructor and the class were quite different. Lesson learned! I’ll always consult with someone prior to introducing them in the future. Thus, I’m not a huge fan of the virtual environment. I used to love readings once the nervousness and anxiety abated. I actually created a reading series with Charlie Petch, The Plasticine Poetry Series, which blossomed from our workshop group at the time. The series ran for roughly 7 years. So, I clearly like poetry readings. It’s the ultimate labour of love running a poetry series! I’m just more cautious now, especially with virtual readings.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

No, unfortunately I don’t have any theoretical concerns. I’ll leave academic concerns to the academics. Writing for me has always been visceral and steeped in the senses. I suppose it’s my way of exploring and making sense of life, but I’ve never viewed it as an intellectual endeavour.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the writer’s role is to turn a mirror on society, increase our societal awareness, and unearth life’s meaning in general. The writer’s role is to both ask and answer insightful questions. We should be able to express and explore life’s truths. We’re coupled with the philosophers in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and we’re trying to delve into the nature of the forms, the true essence of reality.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

No, I defer to peoples’ expertise in a any given area and allow them to work their magic. The important aspect is selecting an editor one respects. I’ve always had editors I respect immensely.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

There are four pieces of advice from Yusef Komunyakaa, Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, and Dan Brown that I adhere to.

With regards to poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa says he never adds during the revising process. He often edits from the “bottom of the poem” aka the ending. He claims we often “write past the poem” in our zeal to provide the reader with everything. We often explain too much and write past the most provocative and essential part of the poem. Consequently, the same often applies at the outset of poems. We often preamble our way into the poems, again, giving the reader more than they need. This advice has helped me tighten poems immensely!

The line I love from Flannery O’Connor is “fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” This always reminds me to write truthfully, even when dealing with confessional subject matter.

Hemingway believed in walking away from your writing and allowing the subconscious to work on it. He said, “always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will  kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” This advice has paid dividends for me and it’s definitely surreal, but my experience validates his notion of the subconscious working on your writing when you turn your focus to other matters and return to the poem or story the following day. 

Dan Brown says to write the ending first. I’m certain other people have probably said this, but I heard it first from him when I viewed Dan Brown’s Masterclass workshop. It definitely works with my fiction.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I laughed when I read this question because I don’t have a writing routine, however, I find myself writing whenever there is a stray minute. I should institute a strict schedule, but there is barely enough time in the day. Thus, I’m often writing during staff meetings or in assemblies whenever I can.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Good question. Music seems to help. Also, rereading my favourite poems of all time unblocks me. These favourite poems are immeasurably magical and always seem to release thunderheads bursting with creativity. Also, I have to consistently remind myself it’s important to just write anything, regardless of its level of mediocrity, since I have to edit anyways.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What a wonderful question. Since I immigrated from Grenada as a child, I’d definitely say the smell of curried chicken or rice and peas.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I mentioned music previously, however, there are myriad subjects from history to pop culture that influence my work. I’m presently working on a series of ekphrastic poems based on the work of a particular photographer, so visual art is a current primary influence!

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I would need multiple pages to list writers that are important to my work. Throughout my life I’ve had a “flavour of the month” pattern with poets and writers. I devour everything about them and then move on to my next literary crush. If I limit this topic to poets, there are still too many to name because I’ve adored poets and lyricists since I was 15. I have printed out roughly 30 poems that I view as near-perfection and marvel at their brilliance. I just need to read one or two of these poems to feel tingles of amazement. The poems are also from a wide range of poets, from Robert Lowell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Adelia Prado, Adonis, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Derek Walcott, to OceanVuong, Susan Elmslie and Alessandra Naccarato. See, it’s a ridiculously wide range of styles and subject matter.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Finish writing my YA novel and collection of short stories! I’d also like to write a poem for the ages such as Robert Lowell’s Epilogue and Skunk Hour.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d love to be President of the USA. That’d be a wonderful gig! Seriously though, I don’t make my living as a “writer” so I’ve never viewed it as my profession. It’s what I love doing the most, however, it doesn’t pay the bills.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Intriguing question! I’ve never pondered or contemplated what made me write. As I mentioned previously, it’s visceral and emanates from within. It’s compulsive on many levels and I can’t pinpoint a specific moment in my life that triggered its activation. Perhaps its intrinsic and as long as I was in the correct environment, it would manifest. It reminds me of something Bob Marley answered when a reporter asked him, “when did you become a musician?” He answered, and I’m paraphrasing, “when does a seed become a tree?” Actually, I think musicians are perfect examples to illustrate this point. Many of the best and most famous musicians can’t read music and never had a lesson! The list of amazing musicians who can’t read music is stunning: Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Noel Gallagher, etc. Many never had a music lesson in their lives. Jimi Hendrix and Elvis are self-taught. The compulsion to sit down and write poems and fiction fully cognizant one will probably never make a living at their craft illustrates how intrinsic this drive is to us poets and writers.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book is Dancing After Ten by Vivian Chong and Georgia Webber. It’s a graphic memoir about the random and heartbreaking event that altered Vivian Chong’s life. I don’t want to ruin the book by revealing more, but if you haven’t read this book, definitely read it! It’s hands down one of the best books I have ever read! She’s also Canadian, so please support her.

Keeping with a Canadian theme here, the last great film was Michel Brault’s Between Salt and Sweet Water. I watched it with subtitles. Unfortunately, my grade 9 French from the 1980’s is insufficient. Actually, that’s another thing I’d like to accomplish, learn French!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m presently working on some ekphrastic poems, a new poetry collection, a YA novel, and a bunch of short stories.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Luke Hathaway

Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book The Affirmations is published by Biblioasis. Both book and audio book (full of music; a co-creation with his friend the scholar/singer Daniel Cabena) are available here: http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/the-affirmations/

1 - How did your first book change your life?

One calls and calls and calls, & eventually ... somebody comes (or, somebodies come).

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

It’s the work of a different poet. death/rebirth: no idle metaphor.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry is my first love: breath, the heartbeat …

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I don’t know any more. Everything I’ve written in the past few years has taken me by surprise.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

There have been books that are projects, but The Affirmations was a miscellany — until it wasn’t.

Some of its poems — many of them, actually — began in music, in the desire to find new words for an old tune (the older words for which often become a point of departure — and sometimes a point of return — for the new ones).

Many, many of them (the poems) began in conversation — with a desire to say something that couldn’t be said in any other way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love to read or speak poetry aloud, my own, or other people’s: any work I love, that is written for the ear. Increasingly I sing, too — see melody as another element of poetry, which one may prescribe or score in various ways, if one sees fit. (Though I am also deeply beguiled by the unstudied, incremental variations in pitch/rhythm/emphasis that inhere in the speaking voice, and that are also part of any reader’s/speaker’s interpretation, as they speak the words in a particular moment, with particular momentums, all reflecting/embodying the contingencies of a particular time and place, a particular audience ….)

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

No theoretical concerns. The only real question I’m trying to answer, in any given moment, is, how is this poem supposed to sound? As for “the current questions”: yikes. I think there’s no one answer.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think writers have a role in trying to keep the bullshit out of language; or, in trying to purge the language of the bullshit, once the bullshit has gotten in.

Beyond that ... writers are listeners, or should be; instruments through which the motion of meaning in the universe can register itself in the particular medium which is language. It has to all keep moving, though; if meaning stays written down, it gets dead. We have to read it, re-speak it, if it’s going to keep on living in the world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Every editorial experience I’ve had has been vastly different. I can’t generalize.

I am an editor myself, and have great respect for what editors can do, the amount of time and care they can lavish on the personal expression of another: it’s really humbling.

But writers need to know how to stand their ground.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Resign yourself to the road; there’s no arriving. (That’s Steven Heighton, from a letter to me when I was about sixteen and he was an avuncular 32.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to libretto)? What do you see as the appeal?

Oh I love crossing boundaries! You know, with consent. It’s marvellous. Stepping across a threshold. Everything looks different on the other side. (And over here, in the libretto-world — there’s company!)

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Wake, shower, coffee, prayer, then I pack lunches for my kids (I am, at this point, a single parent), then I begin the loooooooong and sometimes painful process of getting my kids out of bed, then I make them breakfast, then I say ‘put on your shoes / do you have your backpack / where’s your water bottle’ about fifty times, then we walk to their school (the walk is great: we talk to one another), then I walk to work. (I teach English, at Saint Mary’s University.) On days when I am writing, I do none of this. I moon and june and sleep late and go for long long long walks to and by the ocean, and write letters and listen to fifteenth century Burgundian songs again and again and again and again, and look things up in dictionaries.... For the obvious financial and practical reasons, such days do not happen very often. But when they do, it’s bliss.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I wait it out. Accept the possibility I may never write again. Long experience has taught me it cannot be forced.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of a person I love. The smell of a highway in the rain.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Oh yeah. All of the above.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

All of my friends and correspondents, with whom I’m perpetually in conversation, and including these days my close colleagues at Saint Mary’s (Alexander MacLeod, Raymond Sewell, Gugu Hlongwane …) — I’m so lucky to work with them.

And, then, the various stars in my literary constellation, to which I keep returning; by which I’ve set my bearings in the past .... I think of individual poems here more than poets, but a quick glance at the sky reveals George Herbert, Richard Outram, Peter Sanger, Steven Heighton, Emily Dickinson, W.H. Auden, John Donne, William Shakespeare, also the anonymous psalmists ... These are my old familiars. But/and they are not more important to me than the oral traditions to which I’m heir, via the beauties of teaching and of conversation. These interpenetrate with the written traditions in ways to which I’m increasingly alive.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Take the ferry to Tancook Island.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d love to be a dancer. The word made flesh.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Necessity.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Bible. Ms Marvel (does a TV show count???).

20 - What are you currently working on?

A folk opera (with Benton Roark), an audio-visual album (with the art collective thirtyminutes), a queer cantata and other things with Daniel Cabena (we call our quixotic ensemble ANIMA), the opera Eurydice Fragments (with re:naissance opera) … &/plus always trying to be a better parent / child / friend / lover / colleague / teacher / citizen / community member ... & c. & c. & c.

Oh yes, and I am trying to learn how to sing (better), for a role in A Poor Passion — a retelling of Bach’s Johannes-Passion as a kind of transition story. This is terrifying, & exciting.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Luke Hathaway, The Affirmations

 

My lines insist upon what is:
you stalk me in the hill’s green gestures,
saying, Deare hart, how like you this?
        Expect another, longer letter soon. (“FIRE FLOWER”)

The fourth full-length poetry title, following Groundwork (Windsor ON: Biblioasis, 2011), All the Daylight Hours: poems (Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2014) and Years, Months, and Days: poems (Biblioasis, 2018), and the first I’ve read by Halifax poet and composer/librettist Luke Hathaway is The Affirmations (Biblioasis, 2022), a book that examines, as much as anything else, poetic form. For example, the second piece in the collection is the extended “NEW YEAR LETTER,” a ten-part epistolary experiment across a dozen pages that opens with a lyric explanation, citing W.H. Auden’s own work in the form, the book-length poem New Year Letter (1941). As Hathaway explains:

In January 2018, I decided to try my hand at my own verse letter to a friend, a devotee of Auden, with whom I had been in conversation in person and in letter around some of Auden’s themes. Auden appears in my letter; so does the poem Richard Outram, who had died of hypothermia—his choice—a dozen Januaries earlier, and whose work I was studying at the time I wrote these lines. There are other spirits, familiar and unfamiliar—the poet Rilke, they lay-theologian Charles Williams, one of Bach’s unknown librettists, the great poet Anon…—but for the most part they are like guests at a dinner party: one doesn’t need to know their names (I hope) in order to enjoy the conversation.

As the seventh part of Hathaway’s sequence offers:

This morning I can hear the wind:
it held its fire on the morning
I was walking on the river,
talking to you in my mind,
but right now it howls around
my study. I can hear it in
this poem, the loneliness of letters:
this although the poets say
before the word was sign or symbol,
sacrament, or flesh and blood,
it was this—what? This gap, this Love. 

Wiman calls Christ ‘contingency’.
What happens, to the God’s what is.
Sometimes I pray to that what is—
to help me value, as you say,
the actual over the possible,
and over freedom, yes, the good:
O da quod jubes, Domine. 

Meanwhile what happens picks its way
amid the matted river sedges,
in among the hawthorn branches,
out on the wide river ice,
accident and happenstance
and chance encounter and the glancing
blow. Christ! Can one pray to that?

Hathaway sketches precision narratives across rhythms as skin across a drum, tightening the lyric when required, for higher effect. “The lights when on / and instantly // I saw it: you,” he writes, to open “EROS AND PSYCHE,” immortal; I, // consigned to any / trial your mother // might devise / (beans, rice, // golden fleece / in the thorn tree, // pick-up Styx): [.]” His is a storytelling lyric, perhaps echoing the story-and-song-telling of the libretto, composing examinations and observations and narratives that lean into the ethereal of lyric patters, lullaby, epistolary, essays and operatic nocturnes, and a wordplay of grand theatrical gestures. Hathaway seems to explore the boundaries of poetic form as it relates to an operatic storytelling, pushing at the edges of older forms with a new hand, and a new eye, and seeing what just might be possible. As part of “A POOR PASSION,” subtitled “after Bach’s Johannes-Passion,” Hathaway writes:

I am not the first poet-translator, in English or otherwise, to offer up new words for Bach’s Johannes-Passion. There is a long tradition of this kind of work, which musicologists sometimes call contrafactum—a kind of poesis ‘whereby the music is retained and the words altered’ (OED). Common in medieval and Renaissance music, the practice is still with us in folk song and in hymnody—and of course in childhood: ask any six-year-old who has gleefully chanted, Joy to the world, the school burned down….The practice of contrafactum has analogies in written verse (think of stanzaic poetry) and in life. (What am I, post-transition, but an old tune with new lyrics?)