Ivan Drury published his first book of poetry, Un,
with Talon Books in the spring of 2022. He has lived his whole life on the
unceded territories of Coast Salish and Sto:lo nations; currently, on Squamish,
Musqueam, and Tsleil Waututh lands in East Vancouver, where he teaches history
and labour studies at an international college associated with SFU and drives a
public transit bus. Ivan is a long time revolutionary socialist organizer,
writer, and publisher.
1 - How did
your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?
Over the
course of more than a decade, this book has been part of my effort to change my
life to be consistent with my commitment to remaking a world without capitalism
and colonialism. I wrote the first draft of Un during a time of radical
personal transformation, just after I resigned from a socialist group with a
toxic internal culture. After that initial draft I focused on political
activism, often to the detriment of writing. Now, more than 10 years later,
Talon’s publishing of Un gave me an opportunity to re-engage the
manuscript. For me, from the beginning of writing Un to its publication
feels like the bookends of an important period of my life through which I have
arrived at a more mature appreciation for the thinking-action of writing
poetry.
2 - How did
you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I find myself
uncomfortable with bracketing fiction – and maybe even non-fiction – as
distinct from poetry. In high school I wrote and directed two plays. My
Master’s degree is in history. For more than 20 years I have been writing and
editing community, socialist journalism. A book of non-fiction political essays
that I edited, and wrote, is coming out with ARP Books in the spring. For me,
poetry is one part of an overall approach to writing and thinking, that which is
concerned with problems of political theory that I can’t think through properly
in essay form: the ambivalent, and the feeling of subject formation – aspects
of social and historical life that are too in-motion to write about as
decisively as an essay demands.
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 write single
poems and poem fragments frequently, as notes. Then, when I come across an idea
for a long poem I use those fragments as drafts – I find that I've been
developing the long poem in pieces without knowing it, and then it comes
together. When I wrote Un, the first draft came out in a burst, all at
once, and then I added in fragments through the editing process that took a
long time.
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?
Once I start
working on a book, or long poem, I have that project clearly in mind, and other
writing and thinking is steered towards it. I'm still a young writer, though
not a young person, but at this point I have not ever published the short
pieces or fragments I write along the way.
5 – Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing
readings, though I am still quite nervous about them. I have not done a lot of
readings at this point, but those I have done since the publication of Un
have changed my reading of the book. I have really enjoyed creating visual
landscapes made up of photographs, photo art I made, and videos to pair with
the readings. And while I always thought of the book as one long poem, planning
readings has helped me think through the fragments and threads that run through
that long poem. I look forward to doing readings as part of a process of
testing and more completely understanding the poems I’m working on for my next
project.
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?
At this point,
the general question that motivates all my poetic writing is about the social
construction of hegemonic and subaltern subjectivities through the global
processes of capitalist production – to put it maybe too abstractly. What I
mean is that I’m interested in the feelings people have about who they are in
the world, and the dialectical connection between those feelings and how people
act and what they believe. I am also concerned with this problem, the
relationship between the subjective and the objective, in my political
journalism and theory writing, but I find essays inadequate to dealing with
problems of feeling. I think understanding the historical forces of feelings
are important to an emancipatory political project because, as Italian communist Antonio Gramsci argues, at a certain intensity, feelings take on the
density of material forces and act upon the world like other aspects of
capitalist production.
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?
Well – I think
the “larger culture” needs to be understood as totally submerged in the depths
of the ocean of global capitalist production. My view is that capitalism makes
use of all intellectual production within its compass to reform, adapt, and
perfect its socially reproductive spheres and processes – including and even
especially critical intellectual and creative work. The more a writer plays an
active role in that larger culture, the more they play a passive role in the
rearticulation of bourgeois power.
In the past in
the west, and today in other parts of the world, where capitalist civil society
is not so totalizing, it was possible for writers to exercise commitment to
counter hegemonic power. But this depends on the existence of counter hegemonies
where writers can root themselves. I think writers and other creative producers
can contribute a lot to the thinking, understanding, and development of those
counter hegemonies. In the context of writing within a rapacious and always
expanding imperialist culture, which is currently reaching to include, and
thereby neutralize, the insurgent cultures and politics of Black and Indigenous
peoples, a writer must be carefully attentive to the question of to which power
they are contributing. For a working class white man writer like me, this is a
thorny problem; the class character of the theatre I’m working in is not always
clear. I want my work to contribute to the building of counter hegemonic power,
developing the self-consciousness and critical capacities of subaltern groups,
against white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
In preparing
the final manuscript of Un with Talon Books, I had the good fortune to work
with Catriona Strang. I found working with her really helpful and generative. I
don't think I'd be comfortable publishing anything without first collaborating
with an outside editor!
9 - What is
the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
About writing
itself, rather than the time-discipline surrounding the task of writing, I
often think of the advice from Billy Crystal in Planes Trains and
Automobiles: "writers write." It's a soundbite from pop culture
that replays in my head. I like thinking of writing as a verb rather than an
identity.
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism)? What do
you see as the appeal?
When I work in
journalism for too long, two things happen. First, I start to use too much
heavy metaphor in my journalism and it becomes too pretentious! And second, I
find I start to get too mechanical in my thinking. Poetry, for me, is a method
of thinking that is necessary to a more complete social investigation and understanding.
I don't always find it easy to switch between them because they require a
different pace, poetry takes a lower gear in the transmission of my brain, but
that shift is necessary.
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?
These days I'm
working two jobs and struggling to maintain a political practice of study and
essay writing, as well as writing poetry. So I don't have a typical day. My
ideal day would be to wake up, exercise, read for one hour, and then write for
2 hours – two days of writing essays and then one of writing poetry. But
now I'm scheduling in writing blocks where I have time, after work before
making dinner, and on days off.
12 - When
your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?
When I feel
unable to write, I read and study. My best thinking is sparked by others and I
find writing notes as I read theory and poetry to be the most inspiring space.
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
It's been
three months without rain in Vancouver, and this morning it rained for the
first time. I realized that the most "home" smell for me is the scent
of the wet cement after it has been dry.
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?
I love art
generally. I played in punk bands for years when I was young. I grew up in the
theatre and I have developed a real appreciation for film by going to, and
recently starting to volunteer at The Cinematheque, an art house movie theatre
in Vancouver. I also try to go to art galleries, though I feel like a real
rookie with visual art. I find all art forms inspiring and challenging to my
thinking about writing; I take a lot of notes and think actively through all
art I can access.
And I think I
am personally only at home in nature. For the last 6 years I lived in a cabin I
built on a friend's property in Deroche, outside Mission. He sold the property
this year so I lost the cabin, and thought I could just spend more time climbing
mountains – which I also love doing. But I found I just can't live without
it, so I'm now building a new cabin on another friend's property on the east
side of Stave Lake.
I'd say these
are my two critical inspirations. My writing is full of references to the arts
and the land.
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
The most
important writers for me are communist thinkers: Marx, Gramsci, and Lenin. I
read and return to their work all the time.
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In terms of
writing, I'd like to write and stage a multi-voice performance of a long poem.
I did direct and produce two plays when I was in high school, but not since and
not in the world outside a high school theatre program!
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?
In terms of
the arts, I wish I could have made films. But it feels out of reach to me, in
terms of time, money, and resources, and I think I'm too old to start now.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have wanted
to "be a writer" for as long as I can remember. When I was in my
teens and twenties I thought I'd dedicate myself to writing once I had finished
with the pressing work of travelling, playing music, and then, for the longest
time, political activism. Eventually I realized that I was writing, and
therefore a writer, all along.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
"Great"
is an intimidating term! But the last book I read that I found challenging and
inspiring was Axel Honneth, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of
European Ideas. The most recent book of fiction I read that I really
enjoyed was Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English.
The most
recent film I saw that I thought was great was, Sambizanga, made in 1972
by Sarah Maldoror, a film about women in the Angolan revolution. I took my
labour studies class to see it at The Cinematheque last week and thought it was
an incredible document of struggle, and an inspiring community production.
20 - What
are you currently working on?
I just
submitted grant applications for the first time, for a new long poem
provisionally titled: "Displacing Soviet Vancouver." I'm planning to
compose a book of poetry based on archival research and interviews with my
family members about the pan-Slavic diasporic community that was displaced by Vancouver's
slum clearance program in the 1960s. I'm excited to work on a poem that is
focused on the adjustment of subjectivities outside of but connected to my own,
and through a deep historical study.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
