what we did on our summer staycation, (part two,

[see the first part of our travels here] Two days (again) at Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara Falls, where I hobbled around in my boot, protecting my still-healing broken foot. Where I was unable to go into the water, which allowed a bit more time with notebook, pen; with reading.

Mother-in-law met us there, with six year old nephew in tow, which allowed for some good cousin visits (Christine's brother moving from England to Halifax this summer, which should allow some more-often cousin visits, perhaps). Our young ladies don't get to see any of them that often [although we were in London not long ago, where our young ladies enjoyed a good handful of cousin days].

Day two included a visit to Christine's great-uncle Charlie in Thorold, to see how he's been keeping. On the way back, catching a freighter through the Welland Canal: That boat is so long! Aoife declared. It must be a million Aoifes! (Christine looked it up: apparently "one million Aoifes" is equivalent to 232 metres).

The children, Christine and Oma even played laser tag (Rose came in fourth place, naturally). We all played a round of mini-putt golf. I sat on the step with notebook and reading material during both evenings, and caught a visit (again) from the local skunk, who toddled by both nights (and even the next morning). He was uninterested in whatever it was I was doing. Before we left, both young ladies and nephew their faces painted.

Back in Picton another few days, we landed just in time to catch the latest PEP Rally at the bookstore, curated by Leigh Nash and Andrew Faulkner of Assembly Press (Christine reads at same in September, by the way), with readings by Sneha Madhavan-Reese, Spencer Gordon and Matthew Tierney! What are the odds? I don't even recall the last time I heard either Spencer or Matthew read.

Curious to start going through Spencer's latest, and I haven't even seen Matthew's yet. And did you know that novelist Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer lives rather close? Was good to see her again (we thought the last time we'd seen each other was at the final Scream in High Park in Toronto, which would have been more than a decade ago).

And, once back at father-in-law's place (where we'd deposited the young ladies, just prior to heading to the reading), another three days of attending them, poolside. Another three days of reading, although we did manage a dinner, just the two of us. Up on a hill, way way up above the water. Did you know a small lake in those hills? And a brewery? A view along the water's edge to nearly-Kingston, nearly-Napanee. Point north, where Roblin Mills, or where my birth mother lives. Point east, where the wind farm sits on the horizon. Point east, where a tower sits, near the town of Bath.

In Picton, where the young ladies saw a handful of turtles along the water's edge, and Rose named one "Reginald," taking a forty-minute video (with my phone) of her new best friend and his adventures. Where they sat at the water's edge.

And then, Sunday afternoon, back to Ottawa. Aoife remains, spending some solo time with gran'pa and his wife for a few days, whereas Rose a day-camp began Monday morning.

Margaret Christakos' Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon

SPRINGFLUENCY: A Toronto Poetry Salon will run April 8 - June 17 (ten Monday nights) in Toronto, featuring 8 savoury guest poet-savants Lillian Allen, Oana Avasilichioaei, Adam Dickinson, Nyla Matuk, Jenny Sampirisi, Gillian Savigny, Matthew Tierney and Natalie Zina Walschots, conducted by Margaret Christakos. Register at www.learn.utoronto.ca

This unique lecture-reading course features a series of lectures and readings by eight contemporary Toronto guest poets in person. Course features an intro by facilitator Margaret Christakos, an original 40-minute lecture by one of the participating poets on the work of one of their colleague poets, and a half-hour live reading by the poet under discussion. An exchange of responses and ideas then takes place among the discussant, poet and course registrants. The class reads an assigned book of poetry each week in preparation for the evening's guest poet. Registrants compose written responses to the poetics and ideas encountered during the class and during their own consideration of the poetry being studied. Registrants may return for multiple Salons as the roster of poets changes each term.

The texts under discussion will be available at the first class for $130.

For further information, check out the Influency Salon.

QuArc: Arc poetry magazine + The New Quarterly

We decided on a number of things at the start: we wanted our investigation of the links between science and literature to be serious but not high serious, i.e. we wanted a playful element alongside the more sober investigation of ideas. We were charmed by the behaviour of quarks and by their partly utilitarian, partly fanciful names: Charm, Strange, Up, Down, Top and Bottom (known, for a time, as Truth and Beauty). What if we sent out a call inviting writers to come up with a “particle fiction,” a short work in verse or prose taking as its theme or title one of the beguiling quark names? (We thought there'd be a rush towards truth and beauty, but our poets were most disposed to casting spells, to charms and incantations). Those interested in the life sciences exhibited a playful bent as well. We discovered amongst their contributions a strange and comic bestiary of creatures large and small, sometimes opening a window onto human behavior and anatomy, sometimes shamelessly and hilariously anthropomorphized (see Bruce Taylor on tube creatures, Patricia Young on the sex lives of animals—both on the Arc side).

Elsewhere, we wanted to harness the energy of quarks by bringing in scientists and writers, scientific and literary rhetoric, into collision or conversation. We were interested in how literary writers (I mean a generic distinction here, no slight to writers of science fiction!) mine science for metaphor and its near cousin analogy nearly as often as poets do in order to explain what's non-intuitive or to convey something of their own wonder at the properties and behavior of animate and inanimate things. We were interested, too, in the idea of literature as experiment—both formal experiment and literal, the latter a new frontier pushed in this issue by Christian Bök, who is embarked on creating a “living” poem, encoding a verse of sorts into DNA and seeing how it mutates over time. (Kim Jernigan, “Welcome To This Issue,” The New Quarterly #119)

It doesn't happen that often, but there have been examples in the past of publications joining forces (the three publishers that brought out a Gerry Shikatani poetry collection about a decade back, for example), but it happens rarely enough that it's worth mentioning, such as Ottawa's Arc poetry magazine and Waterloo's The New Quarterly's newly-published conjoined “QuArc” special (as issues #66 and #119, respectively). After months of hearing about the project, it's good to finally see the result, an impressive and ambitious issue working to explore the connections between literary writing and science, writing and the natural world, revealing a whole wealth of responses, from an interview with Alice Munro on fictionalizing late 19th-century Russian mathemetician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky and Matthew Tierney writing on clock radios and time machines to Christian Bök discussing language as a virus and poems from Sean Howard's electrifying work-in-progress, “The Shadowgraphs Project.” 
 

In his recent “12 or 20 questions” posted at Open Book, Toronto writer Matthew Remski mentioned ecology and the final Scream in High Park: “i listened to about thirty excellent writers expose themselves. only two wrote directly about ecology. […] are we that traumatized, that only two of thirty excellent writers can address the fact that the world is on fire?” Part of what makes this particular collaboration, this particular conjoined pair, apart from the focus on the meeting between science and art (something usually overlooked or outright denied), is in how each journal manages to respond from their own particular points-of-view while meeting, quite literally and, appropriately enough, in the middle. 

 

Pentamerous

In your navel I found a five-rayed star,

just the way the cut was made,

pentamerous symmetry, like a starfish

or all those tiny marine creatures—

urchins, sea cucumbers—

cross-sectioned and held together

just as you were held to another life

and then not.

Hold still, my love,

that's what this morphology

is best for.

In the sediment that rains

constantly through the water

the particules of other lives

that touch you and feed you

or,

and I think I forgot to tell you,

that plants are the most pentamerous

of all

like an apple that you slice in half

no, the other way,

perpendicular to the stem

and then you eat the other half. (Monty Reid, from “Host,” Arc #66)

12 or 20 questions: with Matthew Tierney

Matthew Tierney’s second book, The Hayflick Limit, came out with Coach House Books in spring 2009. He is a recipient of a K.M. Hunter Award for Literature, and won 1st and 2nd place in This Magazine’s 2005 Great Canadian Literary Hunt. His poems have appeared in journals and magazines across Canada, including Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead and Eye Weekly, among others. He lives in Toronto.

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 was a long time coming, written off and on over nearly ten years. I was very close to it and both happy and relieved see it into print. Publication itself was a measure of success.
Suddenly, the second book became a “when” not “if”. All that worry about getting published shifted into how it’d be received.

As to how it compares: The first book was written by the poet I wanted to be. The second was written by the poet I am. That make any sense?

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

I came to poetry through fiction. I blame my friends at the time. Steve McOrmond, David Seymour, Andy Weaver. A bad lot.

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?

Starting is not the problem. Finishing is.

Poems come from notes or not depending on the scope, the specifics, my mood, my energy level. Research can be very conspicuous in a poem, like the tics of bad acting. I’m very conscious of this because I tend write about stuff I don’t really understand.

Ideally, I’d like to just know everything so I wouldn’t have to do any research.

That sounds fatuous. It is. But I’m trying more and more to have the research direct me rather than the reverse. Earn the knowledge. Let the poem come out of whatever happens to be in my head.

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?

The poem begins in a complicated place, a miasma of guilt and ambition and intellectual curiosity. Though sometimes it’s just rainy out and I feel like writing. Who knows how things get done?

Poems fall into a book by default. I’m usually interested in one thing for a long time, and the poems tend to flock together, probably for protection.

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

Readings don’t play a part in my process. They’re enjoyable though. I’m a wreck heading into them, but they turn out all right. And there’s usually a pint or two involved.

Also, it’s one arena where humour in a poem is welcome. Then it’s smacked on the nose and sent back to the corner where it belongs.

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?

I’ve been toying with the idea that all poems are failures. The good ones are, anyway.

I don’t mean a failure of language, though that’s always the pink elephant in the room.

Something more particular about the kind of failure. It’s necessary for poetry to fail to be prose, for one. Or even to fail to make “sense.” Like the way quantum physics breaks from classical. Following a logic of its own creation—which is tautological, now that I think about it.

These are some of the answers I’m attempting to question with my work.

7 What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the writer should be to write good poems. Even if you write fiction. Okay, a good novel might count. But nothing over 300 pages.

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

Both.

The editor-writer relationship exists to challenge your work. You have to respond to that challenge intelligently and seriously. Sometimes it’s frustrating, even deflating, though it’s always worth it to make the poem better.

I can’t imagine being confident enough to bring the poems into the public sphere all by myself. Doubt is good for a writer. It makes you listen.

I’m lucky to have good friends who happen to be good editors, and who also value what I do. And Kevin Connolly, who edited my new collection, was a complete gentleman the whole time.

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

Stay in school.

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 approach my writing like a serial monogamist approaches a relationship. I have stretches of fairly strict routine, writing generally post-coffee to suppertime on days when I can.

Then I have stretches of nothing. No flings, no flirting. I really let myself go.

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

My writing doesn’t really work like that. I have plenty of ideas to get to. It’s just laziness and lack of time. As soon as I snap-to and get enough scratch together, I’m good to go.

12 - What fairy tale character do you resonate with most?

Sneezy.

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?

The Hayflick Limit was chiefly informed by various branches of science, some math and economics. This was a conscious effort to sharpen my focus and a way to reforge some neural paths (I began my undergraduate as a physics major).

The scientific gaze sometimes chafes against sensory experience. We “see” a coherence in the world that isn’t really there. I wanted to exploit this, create a hyper-aware poem. You don’t need to know the biochemistry involved when you walk across a room, but what if you did? What if your head had access to this knowledge as easily as you do the visible spectrum or sound waves?

Muldoon would say that we reconstruct the consciousness behind a poem in order to read it. I say, make the ride as interesting as you can.

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

I lean on those non-fiction writers who do all the hard work for me. You know, the ones who do ten years of field research and then condense it into a short book that I can digest between naps.
Also, poets. Joseph Brodsky, August Kleinzahler. Jo Shapcott. Carol Ann Duffy, Tomas Tranströmer. Michael Hofmann. Closer to home, David McGimpsey, the aforementioned Kevin Connolly (“Chain:” from Drift is the poem I’m forever trying to write). I have friends that I think are doing some great work that I won’t list for fear of accidentally leaving someone out.

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

Suit up for the Leafs on a Saturday night.

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’m always moaning about how I should’ve stuck out the science degree. When I go on vacation, I inevitably end up at places like MIT or the Santa Fe Institute, walking around the facilities, pretending I’m hard at work inventing the math to test out a wild theory. Then I go buy a T-shirt at the gift shop.

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

I’m not sure. By age ten, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Nobody seemed to think that was a bad idea.

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

I’m going to throw in two: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and O’Meara’s Noble Gas, Penny Black.

Films can frustrate me. More specifically, the third acts of films frustrate me. I admit I don’t put much effort into seeking out the good ones—sometimes I’d just rather be laughing at Will Ferrell.
TV, though—finishing up the Deadwood series right now. Got Damages on deck. I crave these long, unfolding narratives.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Just completed a winter’s worth of edits on the book. I’m gearing up for a tour out west with Jeramy Dodds in April. Then I’ve promised myself I’m going to sit down and write some more poems.

12 or 20 questions archive (second series);