Thammavongsa: Describe an image of a
place you’ve travelled, and why it’s important to you to have been there.
Brand: The Atacama Desert. It
was the quiet of it as soon as I arrived. This quiet settled everything I had
been experiencing before; it quelled several years of disturbance.
Thammavongsa: Deserts are examples
of maximalism. The quiet can be so large, so weighted, it is louder than any
disturbance. I say this because it’s how I like to think of my writing. The
quiet, the silence, the nothing there is maximized. I make things bare and I
amplify that.
Brand: It’s wonderful that
you say deserts are examples of maximalism. I had strangely thought minimalism!
I wanted to go someplace empty of noise. You are right, the silence crowded out
the disturbance.
You’ve
been to a desert; what was it like for you?
Thammavongsa: Yes. In Marfa, Texas.
The land was so flat. All I noticed was sky. It made me feel seasick. It was
too much. And I loved the tumbleweeds. I was so happy to see them. I know that
tumbleweeds began somewhere and they take the shape they have because nothing
stood in the way of their tumbling-toward.
The
structure of this book mirrors the last, with a few key adjustments. We’ve
added poems to the book—poems which, for the most part, are mentioned in the
conversations themselves—in hopes they will deepen the reader’s experience.
We’ve also set out to have these be true conversations
as opposed to interviews, with both poets posing questions to one another and
contributing equally. Tied to that, while the book does adhere to the structure
of pairing established and up-and-coming poets, the qualifications for who fits
in which category were amorphous and largely ignored while finalizing a
pairing. There are poets in the up-and-coming slots who have published as many
books, or are nearly as old, as some of the “established” poets. Oh rule
sticklers, it’s a mess! Fortunately, you’re entering a party and not a
coronation.
What the Poets are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation includes ten conversations between an
intriguing array of paired currently-active Canadian poets—Steven Heighton and
Ben Ladouceur, Armand Garnet Ruffo and Liz Howard, Sina Queyras and Canisia Lubrin, Dionne Brand and Souvankham Thammavongsa, Marilyn Dumont and Katherena Vermette, Sue Goyette and Linda Besner, Karen Solie and Amanda Jernigan, Russell Thornton and Phoebe Wang, Tim Bowling and Raoul Fernandes, and Elizabeth Bachinsky and Kayla Czaga, as well as an afterward co-written by Nick Thran and
Sue Sinclair—running quite the range of engaged contemporary writers from emerging
to established, and lyric to the more experimental. The highlights abound, but
some of what struck included an utterly charming and illuminating sequence of
seeming non-sequiturs between Dionne Brand and Souvankham, the conversational
topography between Steven Heighton and Ben Ladouceur, and a fascinating
conversation between Armand Garnet Ruffo and Liz Howard, two poets of similar
heritage; born a generation apart, they were both raised in the village of
Chapleau in Northern Ontario. As their conversation includes:
Howard: I think you’re exactly
right that there is this all-too-steady gaze on the traumatic Indigenous
experience. I also often wonder about what might be called Indigenous
“futurisms,” or futures or possibilities, aesthetic potentials as you have
said. I think I have made a way toward that in my work. At least that was the
intention, the necessity. The fracturing, the hardship, the wound, whether
within oneself and/or within one’s lineage as an Indigenous person is a fact.
The question is what to do? Ultimately for myself as a writer, I discovered the
figure of the infinite citizen of the shaking tent. Perhaps I am a kind of
slippery, in-between, trickster spirit. I suppose this is the figure of myself
as a writer that could compose in so many formally inventive and generative
ways, pulling in neuroscience, the bush, Western philosophy, Nanabozho, dreams,
calling down the sky, Toronto streets, ecological concerns and so on, and
compressing them all together into my account, my gift, my book. The trauma,
the silence, the absence is there too. But I think it is an ultimately joyful
text. I see your work on Norval as being along the same lines. You don’t leave
him with us as either a tragic or revelatory figure. He’s deeply human. I see
the possibilities for Indigenous work as being an open and variegated as each
of our stories.
Honestly,
while going through this collection, I’m a bit surprised that there hasn’t been
more talk around just how strong this assemblage of conversations actually is. This
is, I would say, one of the examples of the follow-up surpassing the original,
moving beyond the limitations of a particular aesthetic into a possibility of
subject matter, one that is incredibly far-ranging and timely. Part of what
this curated list of poets allows for is also the possibility for multiple
conversations around race, representation and how a variety of violences have
impacted individuals and communities, as well as writing, and how writing has
been forced to adapt in response. Over the past decade or so, conversations
around diversity, colonialism, #MeToo, #IdleNoMore and other topics that had
long been bubbling under the surface have risen to the mainstream, and a series
of shifts in publishing and possibility have allowed the same to emerge in
writing as well, and this book does well to allow for those conversations, some
of which might be seen as long overdue.
