12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Richard Greene

Richard Greene was born in Newfoundland and lives now in Cobourg, Ontario. His third collection of poetry Boxing the Compass won the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. That book contained the long poem “Over the Border” which describes his journeys through the United States by Greyhound and Amtrak in the period following 9-11. Greene’s biography of the poet Edith Sitwell has recently been published to widespread acclaim in the UK.

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 very important to me and it gave me the sense of the world of poetry reaching beyond the tip of my pen. My poetry nowadays is, oddly enough, both somewhat more formal and more colloquial. I am possibly more cheerful, but the essential sensibility is not much changed. I am better at concrete descriptions.

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

In high school a friend of my was writing poetry modelled on Robert Frost; that got my attention. I have always wanted to write fiction and hope to make a success of it eventually. Most of what I have ever published could be described as “non-fiction” – most recently a fat biography of the English poet Edith Sitwell.

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 am extremely slow. Most years I write perhaps 6 or 7 pages of poetry. The long poem “Over the Border” was a steadier project but even there, I wrote a bit of it in 2003 and went back to it in 2006.

Where does poetry 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?
Each poem tends to be a separate undertaking, so the books are built up like a reef.

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am a pretty good reader, but no, I don’t place a high value on the public reading of poetry. But sometimes I can’t hack the atmosphere of readings, especially the open mike – this is what I call my nut allergy.

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 started my university career as a critical theorist, but lost sympathy with it. My work is an odd mix of religious vision, gags, social satire, and elegies. Go figure.

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?
Writers do a number of things – imagine selves we will never get to, remember goodness that is passing away, dismantle the present – essentially you resolve your experiences into laughter and silence. I suppose a good writer is like a Shakespearian clown – one who makes a big show of being silly and separate, but is in fact quarrelling with the culture.

Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find being edited essential. Especially with poetry, you always need the other set of eyes.

What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Not quite an answer to the question you have asked, but how about this: Twenty-five years ago, the British poet Peter Levi thought there was something odd about me. Usually young poets, he said, develop technique and wait for the voice. In my case, I had a very clear voice but no technique. I had to work on that. It occurs to me now that the woods are full of capable young poets who have absolutely nothing to say. They are smooth, smooth, smooth. They remind me of pianists who will not lean in to the keyboard – as an old Russian virtuoso put it to my stepdaughter, “You have to play inside keys-- you play on surface -- like snake!” I think young poets should take on reckless experiences – go to Haiti, go to Vegas, go to Baffin Island, go to Nascar. Get away from coffee houses. Stop prating about whatever is the latest flutter in poetry journals. They should look for strange experiences that will help them find the measure of themselves – help them find the singularity of their own minds.

How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
It seems normal to take on different challenges. It is all pleasurable.

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 such different projects that my daily schedule is varying – also for half the year I am teaching.

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
A handful of poets and poetical novelists – most often, actually, the work of Peter Levi. I don’t write like him at all, but Al Moritz can have that effect on me sometimes.

What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fir trees.

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 am not particularly musical, but there is lots about music in my writing. I come from a family of pianists and politicians. I don’t know exactly what effect it has had on my poetry, but my mother is a painter, and I am sure there is an influence there.

What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are lots of odd influences, Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, John Steinbeck, Roy Fuller, R. S. Thomas, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, John Masefield, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Yeats, Heaney, H.D. How about the novels of Patrick O’Brian?

What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to write a good novel.

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 have had a pretty odd life, could have been a priest, a lawyer, a politician. Who knows?

What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was the thing I was best at and most passionate about. 

What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Derek Walcott’s White Egrets. A little behind the times, I would say the last great film I saw was, No Country for Old Men.

What are you currently working on?

A novel to be titled The Rum Jar – it may not work out. We will see.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

VERSeFest, Ottawa’s first annual poetry festival

Ottawa recently celebrated VERSeFest [photo of our own John W. MacDonald, super-photographer], organized as Ottawa’s newest annual poetry festival. Headed by Rod Pederson, David O’Meara, Jessica Ruano, Kevin Matthews and Monty Reid, the festival managed to corral fourteen of the city’s reading series into a spectacular collage of events at the Arts Court, from participating hosts Plan 99, The TREE Reading Series, Dusty Owl, Capital Slam, The AB Series, Voices of Venus, The Factory Reading Series, In/Words, blUe mOnday Reading Series, Urban Legends, the Sasquatch Reading Series, Oneness Poetry Collective, KaDo Haiku and the Ottawa Youth Poetry Slam. What became quickly apparent was in how the side-by-side events were managing audience crossovers between what has unfortunately been labeled “page” and “stage” poets (designations I find problematic, but at least understand for the sake of clarity, to talk about the chasm between groups).

One of the features of the festival was in how it managed so very well to highlight many writers in the local Ottawa community, while also bringing in talented outsiders, including John Akpata, Richard Greene, Amanda Earl, Steven Ross Smith, David McGimpsey, Chris Turnbull, Ian Keteku, Craig Poile, Sandra Ridley, Christine McNair, Brad Morden, Beth Anne Fischer, Barry Dempster, D-LightFul, Sense-Say, Michael Dennis, Ben Ladouceur, Danielle K.L. Gregoire, Karen Solie, jwcurry and singer-songwriters Mike Dubue and Megan Jerome.

What will be interesting will be in seeing just what happens next, if all the reading series in the city manage, through the increased publicity and attention, more audience across the board, or if it simply falls back to where it was before, post-fest. What will be interesting to see will be how the festival develops, over the next couple of years. Anyone interested in readings in Ottawa generally should just check out the Bywords site, which lists everything literary, festivals and otherwise.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it out to much (other postings exist for various events from VERSeFest, including those by Amanda Earl, Pearl Pirie, John W. MacDonald, Kate Hunt and Charles Earl), but here are some notes I scribbled down during some of what I did catch.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Ottawa poets Christine McNair and Sandra Ridley read as part of the blUe mOnday Reading Series, hosted and organized by Aaron Kozak and Sean Moreland. McNair, the author of the self-published chapbook Evidence (cartywheel press, 2010) is author of “Conflict,” one of nine manuscripts recently shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, now forthcoming in spring 2012 with BookThug. Ridley, on the other hand, is author of the acclaimed poetry collection Fallout (Hagios, 2009), the chapbook Rest Cure (Apt. 9, 2010), co-winner of the 2009 bpNichol Chapbook Award for her Lift: Ghazals for C. (Jackpine, 2008) and author of the forthcoming Post-Apothecary (Pedlar Press). 

Interestingly enough, a collaborative manuscript Ridley wrote with another Ottawa poet, Amanda Earl, was also on the Kroetsch Award shortlist (a further Ottawa poet, Pearl Pirie, actually won), meaning that Ottawa women poets made up a third of an impressive shortlist.

Following an open set that seemed (unfortunately) to drag on a bit long (especially after a previous event featuring many of the same performers), Christine McNair and Sandra Ridley each read a set of recent writing, both taking turns stepping up into the other’s set for a poem for two voices. McNair’s work over the past few years, between this and her recent Voices of Venus event, bounces furiously along with clear, hummingbird intensity, and include a quiet, sly and subversive humour, bouncing language at the speed of light, the speed of sound.

sweetness

a dolce tiramisu cut into shreds

reshaped into threats

the trauma of being everywhere

and nowhere all at once

‘even when we are quite alone’

‘we recognise the same influence’

‘a man cannot prevent past impressions’

a desolation of cupcakes and sherry

my ears melt into pads of cotton

wool fear a seed stitch picked off hems

icing sugar caulks broke tile dusts

breast petals falls in drifts

For Sandra Ridley, her lines extend like horizon lines, furthering even longer than the endings, and slowly edge their way so far you manage to lose yourself, completely, asking, how exactly did we get here? I’ve long been a fan of Ridley’s long prairie breaths, long prairie lines, but so much of her reading was obscured by a muddy sound system, and I was occasionally lost in her poems’ horizons. How did I get here? After seeing fragments of her forthcoming second poetry collection for months now, I am very interested in seeing the shape of the entire second manuscript.

Friday, March 11, 2011

It became striking to note that The Factory Reading Series has existed back to January, 1992, when I began to organize readings in the Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, some nineteen years ago. How do things manage to exist for so long? Striking, or perhaps even terrifying. What previously was called Poetry 101 (for a time), what before that didn’t even have a name, with events going back through The Ottawa Art Gallery, The Carleton Tavern, Gallery 101 (two locations), The Mercury Lounge, Mother Tongue Books, Collected Works and the Stone Angel. I’m sure there are some other locations I’m just not remembering right now. Nineteen years is a long, long time.

For this event, I thought it would be more interesting for poets familiar to Ottawa audiences to give a series of talks, to extend what we already know of their works. Marcus McCann, formerly of Ottawa but now living in Toronto, presented his “No Permission: Why Poets Don’t (and Shouldn’t) Ask Nice,” followed by Ottawa poet Monty Reid’s “How Come Inger Isn’t Here?” And perhaps this will be my annual contribution to the festival, featuring two writers talking about writing, featuring one local and another from further away. Both pieces are scheduled to appear online this fall in the fourth issue of the online journal seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Marcus McCann, formerly of Ottawa but spending most of his time these days in Toronto talked on permissions, referencing writing such as flarf and plunder, asking, is citation necessary? Is permission? And how far do these “borrowings” extend before legalities emerge? His talk gave the most interesting post-lecture discussion, heading off in all sorts of directions including Canadian copyright law, and just what exactly qualifies as “theft.”

Monty Reid’s talk began with absence, suggesting that The Odyssey and The Iliad were both stories about absence (which others have referred to as stories about home, about the return, about the entire journey being one of return instead of leaving). As he said, we predominantly write and talk about what is not actually there, not here. Poems of leaving, poems of loss, poems even of heartbreak. He ended the piece by talking about three poets who were also not “here,” reading at the festival. VERSeFest aims to be international in scope, which is a worthy goal, but not always easy for the first year, for the sake of organizing and funding, but one of the poets he mentioned “not here” was Inger Christensen, a Danish poet not at VERSeFest in part because she had died in January 2009. Here’s a poem from her Butterfly Valley (original title: Sommerfugledalen, trans. Susanna Nied; Dedalus, Poetry Europe Series No. 9, 2001). There were two other poets he mentioned, very much alive, but of course I can’t remember their names. Why is Inger not here?

VI

Delusion for the universe’s fool

is the belief that other worlds exist

that there are gods who bellow and roar

and call us random tosses of the dice;

just remind me of a summer day in Skagen

when arctic blues, in their mating flight,

fluttered about all day like bits of sky

with echoes of the blue from Jammerbugten,

while we, who lay lost in hills of sand,

as numerous as only two can be,

allowed our bodies’ elements to blend

with earth as fusion of sky and sea,

two people who bequeathed to one another

a life that does not die like anything.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Originally Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series (considered the third-longest continuing reading series in Canada, alongside Harbourfront and Montreal’s Yellow Door) had planned to host three poets instead of two, but David Seymour, body-double for actor Russell Crowe, got caught up in a film shoot in Sault Ste. Marie. How strange is that, and have there ever been poems emerge from his time spent doubling? I’m intrigued by this.

Otherwise, TREE hosted Cobourg, Ontario poet Richard Greene, Governor-General’s Award for Poetry 2010 winner for his Boxing the Compass (Signal/Vehicule Press, 2010). Having already gone through part of his book, I knew it wasn’t going to appeal, stylistically, yet I found him a charming performer, reading excerpts of a longer, more narrative poem about his Greyhound travels through the United States, there for the sake of editorial/archival work on the (unrelated to him) writer, Graeme Greene.

I’ve heard Toronto poet Karen Solie perform a number of times over the past decade or more, and there’s just something about her soft, subtle and smart explorations that are getting stronger as she continues, with an undertone of wry humour that comes through far stronger through performance. I think I’ve heard her read from her mega-award-winning Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) at least three or four times now [see my report of the Griffin Prize reading here; see my review of her book here], so I could imagine that she’s possibly wearing on the collection, and her reading included a small selection of newer poems (one exists in the festival-specific issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club) which were quite magnificent. How could anyone else manage a love poem about rental cars, or is it really a love poem? (It probably is.)

Sunday, March 13, 2011

One of the last events was The Dusty Owl Reading Series, featuring Ottawa poet, publisher, performer, bookseller and archivist jwcurry. Steve Zytveld and Cathy Zytveld-MacDonald have been running their Dusty Owl Reading Series (with a slight break in the mid-1990s) for fifteen years now, which is an impressive amount of time. They’re even working up to an anniversary party, if you can believe it, in May at the Elmdale Tavern, which I am very much looking forward to.

Given his recent major performances in multi-vocal sound works, it was an interesting counterpoint to hear jwcurry feature his reading on a series of straighter texts, starting with a fragment of his correspondence with British writer and music critic Ben Watson, known for his extensive work on the late Frank Zappa (a curry favourite, alongside bpNichol), including the seminal Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1995). I’ve always wondered, when will someone attempt a Ph.D. on the collusions between bpNichol and Frank Zappa, as seen through the critical lens of jwcurry? I’m just disappointed that curry himself can’t work the project, given the sheer amount of other works he keeps adding to. Once the suggestion between the two is made, the connections almost begin to make themselves.

The excerpt of curry’s correspondence with Watson explored considerations of fatherhood and children, Frank Zappa’s music, postmodernism and the avant-garde. Given his less-than-usual productivity as a publisher over the past year or three, there are those of us clamouring less for more of his critical writings (or even a collection of some of his criticism) for the sake of simply wishing for more of what he used to make regularly, from the 1cents to chapbooks to newsnotes [see my review of a recent issue here]. Where have all the 1cents gone?

The highlight certainly came at the end, when curry’s infamous LAND IS DOWN piece was performed as a work in two voices with Alastair Larwill, one of the group that participated in curry’s most recent Messagio Galore [see my report here].