U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Tim Lilburn (1999-2000)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.



Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. He has published nine books of poetry, including To the River (1999), Kill-site (2003), and Orphic Politics (2008). His work has received Canada’s Governor General’s Award (for Kill-site), the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award among other prizes. A selection of his poetry is collected in Desire Never Leaves: the Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007). Lilburn has produced two books of essays, both concerned with poetics, eros and politics, especially environmentalism, Living in the World as if It Were Home (1999) and Going Home (2008). His poetry has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Polish, French, German and Serbian. His most recent book is Assiniboia (2012), an opera for chant in three parts, sections of which have been choreographed and performed by contemporary dance companies in Canada, notably Regina’s New Dance Horizons. He recently collaborated with Edward Poitras and Robin Poitras of New Dance to produce the opera/dance “House of Charlemagne” on the life of Honore Jaxon. A new poetry collection, The Names, will appear spring, 2016. He teaches at the University of Victoria. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2014.

He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 1999-2000 academic year.

Q: When you began your residency, you were the author of a small handful of books. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?

A: When I went to the U of A, I had published five books, Names of God, Tourist to Ecstasy, From the Great Above She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below, and To the River, all poetry, and a collection of essays called Living in the World As If It Were Home. I was a little at an impasse in my work; I wanted to do something different, to make a shift in how I came at things. The year in Edmonton, working in the writer-in-residence program, gave me a break from my usual life and a freedom to take a good look around. I started writing some of the poems that made up Kill-site during that time.

Q: What was the impasse you were attempting to reconcile? Was it a shift in tone, or the line, or something else?

A: I wanted to find a way to get more political and philosophical content into a poem, without completely breaking out of the lyric gesture, like I had seen mid Nineties poets in Beijing do. To come to something bulkier, more spreading, but still with a driven music and compelling turns.

Q: Was this your first residency?

A: No. I was w-in-r at the U of Western Ontario in 1989-90 and at the Regina Public Library 1998-9, the year before I went to U of A. I also did a short residency at St. Mary’s University in Halifax.

Q: Looking back on the experience now, how did your University of Alberta experience compare to those other residencies?

A: I remember that year in Edmonton fondly. The department gave me a warm welcome. I had an apartment on Saskatchewan Dr., about a thirty minute walk from the university, near the farmers’ market, a jazz club and a couple of good bookstores, which may no longer be there. The residencies at Western and the RPL were also great, open spaces to think about my work outside my normal routine. I enjoyed talks with Kristjana Gunnars, Bert Almon, Doug Barbour and Greg Hollingshead, long walks by the North Saskatchewan, Oilers games.

Q: How did you engage with students during your residency? Were there any that stood out?

A: I visited numerous classes during my year in Edmonton and met, one-on-one, with many students, poets, prose writers, playwrights. Audrey Whitson stands out among those I consulted with. She was working on a manuscript, which was eventually published as Teaching Places, an important book, and one that I have used in my own teaching. I enjoyed that people from outside the university community, like Audrey, came in to see me. I remember people coming from as far away as Hinton. The city and region had embraced the writer-in-residence program and used it. I also taught a weekend non-credit poetry workshop, and I recall writers like Erin Michie from those sessions.

Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?

A: Well, the landscape was very much my own then. I was living in Saskatoon in those days. I liked to get out to a nice series of trails near Camrose, prairie, ponds and sloughs. That would be a good Sunday outing. Then there were the river trails.

I enjoyed the vital poetry scene in the city, The Stroll of Poets, in which Alice Major was deeply involved, readings at the university. I spent quite a bit of time talking to Tim Bowling and Ted Blodgett about poetry in general.

Edmonton was a great book store city back then, but I don’t know what that scene is like now. Book stores seem to evaporate rather quickly. Long afternoons grazing away at Greenwoods.

Brick: A Literary Journal #92

            So. Why has Harriet Martineau become so little known? It’s even more of a mystery when you begin to examine the life and work of Harriet Martineau, by which I mean simply to skim the surface, like I’ve been doing these past few months, lift the corner of the beginnings of what there is to know about this writer and find this versatility: campaigner, autobiographer, biographer, translator, philosopher, novelist, political economist, travel writer, world’s first writer of a how-to book, world’s first female journalist to be retained by a paper as one of its key writers—for she wrote nigh on two thousand anonymous leaders for the London paper the Daily News, particularly making use of contacts she’d made on trips to the United States when it came to covering the American Civil War. (Ali Smith, “The Hour and the Woman”)

Reading might be a tricky thing these days (given the invention of baby), but I’ve been slowly going through the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#92, winter 2014). The issue opens with a piece by Ali Smith, “The Hour and the Woman,” on the writer Harriet Martineau (1780-1877), and presented as “The inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of Norwich, UNESCO City of Literature.” One of my favourite prose writers for some time, Smith explores the life, influence and legacy of Norwich-born Martineau, writing that “When Virginia Woolf makes a speech about professions for women to the National Society for Women’s Service in January 1931, she lists the names of the women who’ve ‘made the path smooth’ for her, not only smooth but possible at all, as a woman whose profession is literature. ‘For the road was cut many years ago,’ she says, ‘by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot.’” I’ve always been partial, myself, to seeking out the disappeared, given that the reasons for disappearance are always so slight, so random, and forgetfulness is far easier than you might imagine. It would seem a clear oversight that any writer on such a list would have fallen by the wayside to by nearly completely forgotten, especially given the breath, volume and influence of the works published by Martineau throughout her lifetime. Smith continues: “This ‘irrepressibility’ might be one of the reasons she’s not read as much as she might be now. Her writing is, shall we say, fountainous. Another reason might be that the changes of which she’s the vanguard have all happened; we take them for granted.”

Brick: A Literary Journal has long been one of my favourite Canadian literary journals, providing insight into the familiar and the unfamiliar, usually showcasing international writers and works I hadn’t previously had any awareness of, and this issue features an interview by Brick regular Eleanor Wachtel with writer Richard Sennett, an interview by Forrest Gander with Eikoh Hosoe, and essays by Donald Richie, Simon Loftus, Tim Lilburn and Baziju (the collaborative author made up of poets Kim Maltman and Roo Borson). Ottawa writer and translator Mark Fried includes an essay on Severo Sarduy, to accompany a short story by the same writer, translated by Fried. So many of the pieces collected in each issue, whether non-fiction, interviews, fiction, photography, correspondence and even the occasional poem, are wrapped around ideas of small, detailed moments, memory and deep attention. We need to pay attention.

Everything was agitation amidships, hither-thither, hurry-hurry. The crewmen, half-naked, desiccated, and feverish, ran to the bridge and contemplated the city jubilantly; they pointed at the yellowed and twisted features of the palatial buildings as if these were mirages from their deliria during the passage, or as if they recognized them and were confirming the accuracy of the engravings they had been shown in the mother country to beguile them with the pageantry of America. Then they turned the other way, toward the pink towers of the churches and the light green crowns of the royal palms that swayed like cool sprouting grass the length of the port’s boulevard. They ran singing and whistling back to their cabins and tossed bucketfuls of water at one another, swabbing their pale sopping hides now that they no longer had to go even without drinking to make the water last. (“It’s Going to Snow,” Severo Sarduy, trans. Mark Fried)

And of course, I’ve only space to even mention less than half of what lives inside the nearly two hundred pages of issue number ninety-two. One of the really highlights of the issue is a piece by Victoria fiction writer Yasuko Thanh, who writes elegantly and memorably on photography and memory in her piece “Memento Mori,” that includes:

            I came across an artist on YouTube, Michael David, who’d built a greenhouse out of glass daguerreotypes because the story, mythologized in a few seconds in a documentary film on the Civil War, haunted him so. Linda Bierds wrote a series of poems about glass-plate greenhouses for her book The Profile Makers. Collage artist Michael Oatman recreated the structure with a group of architectural students.

            Ideas make me think of seed pods. They way they burst and scatter and float and settle and sit and warm to the dirt. Take root, grow too stubborn to pull out.

            In fact, the story isn’t true. The Library of Congress can account for the majority of the glass plates in the Civil War Collection—even broken plates are painstakingly collected, each sliver in its own pocket. No collection is missing enough plates to have built a field of greenhouses.

            But as with most legends, the message about transience is true. It’s what I think about when I think of photographs. We don’t want to be betrayed by time. We want our memories to stick around.

Another highlight is by American poet C.D. Wright, who provides the most thoughtful and exquisite short essay on a poem by Michael Ondaatje, his “Driving with Dominic / in the Southern Province / We See Hints of the Circus” from his collection Handwriting (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1998). She ends her piece with:

There are no grand strategies at work in this poem. There is no sabotage to syntax or sequence in which information is delivered. There is no pronounced rhythm. No ulterior philosophical message. With terrific economy a lush environment is suggested. With characteristic restraint a little world is made. One blogger dismissed the poem as something as easy to write as striking a match and blowing it out. It could well have been so simply bestowed, that effortlessly executed. The poem could be the nucleus of one of the central characters and narratives of a novel to come, Divisadero, for instance. I suggest that it is.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Tim Lilburn

Tim Lilburn has published eight books of poetry. A new collection, Assiniboia, will appear this spring. He teaches at the University of Victoria.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
 That first book, seeing it published, was amazing. Ron Smith at Oolichan had done a great job. I loved everything about it from a design point of view, the cover, the paper. All books since have been special in their own ways; all make me anxious, expectant. Something is closing down, a preoccupation spanning five or more years, an emptiness is following, maybe something new coming in. The look of my new book, Assiniboia, out this spring, I find quite striking, the cover, the arrangement on the inside. Erin Cooper at M&S did the whole design, inside and out – her work amplifies in a powerful way what the text is doing. She saw something in the poems and drew it into visual language.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? As far as I can remember, I started writing quite bad poetry when I was very young, composing it as I walked a paper route. I liked how words could link together musically and carry the punch of emotion. Much, much later, I started writing essays, mostly to get outside of poems to talk in a broader way about what the poems were saying. So now essays and poetry are complimentary texts for me, and both are, in part, vehicles of philosophy, and both are, in part, religious devices or exercises. But this could make things sound a little stiffer, more intentioned, than they really are – I mostly just sniff around.

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?
 The book I am finishing now was my main focus for five years. It built up slowly, but I knew from the outset that I wanted it to be a long performable, choreographable (a word?) poem for many voices, some of which would belong to Sara Riel, Louis Riel and various landforms that have the power of speech. I’ve been working with Robin Poitras at New Dance Horizons in Regina on a performance of a part of the central long poem, and I see this as a necessary extension of the book. We plan to stage a version shortly after Assiniboia is released, a sort of danced opera of chant. I love collaboration with artists in other mediums, and Robin is a truly brilliant creator.

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?
 It may sound, from the previous response, that I imagine myself working on a book from the outset, but really I write from single lines, or phrases or just nouns, or simply a particular rhythm that has gotten into my head. The whole shape of the thing becomes clear as I move along. But with Assiniboia I had these hunches from the beginning. I wanted to imagine an alternate western Canada, not resource exploiting, not homogeneous, not petro-state-ish. I just didn’t know how to get there. But I recognized, as anyone would, that if you are serious about pursuing such a vision, you simply must go through the political imagination of Riel and his two Provisional Governments.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do rather like them. I like how a poem or stretch of poems can show what they are doing as you perform them. Reading is a way of hearing the music of the work more acutely.

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? 
For many years, a central concern in all my work has centered on autochthonicity, that is, how is it possible for descendants of settlers, for denizens of the ethos of uprooting, anarchic capitalism to be at home where they are? This isn’t a theoretical problem for me, but a personal one – how to form a vivifying link with the land where one is? It’s an affective problem, an erotic question. It is also a question that touches on identity and one’s sense of meaning. Without this link, all sorts of loneliness and violence is possible. This isn’t or shouldn’t be news to anyone.

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?
 I’m going to skip this one. The response just above gets roughly at it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
 Both, I’d say. It’s great to be heard deeply. My editor with the new book was Ken Babstock, an exquisite, sharp reader.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
 Can’t think of the best. Just watching some people work from a distance or close up has been an education and an inspiration. Tomaz Salamun, Jan Zwicky, Don Domanski, book after book, these long forays into whatever draws them.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal? 
I’m usually relieved as I move from one sort of project, an essay, a review, back to poetry or vice versa. The shifting brings lightness in. I’m working with different sets of muscles.

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 like to get up quite early and get to the shed where I work in the back of the property as soon as possible. By mid to late morning a certain beachhead has (or not) been achieved. Then walking, reading, talking if I can find someone to share a beer or coffee with.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? 
Lately I’ve turned to Gershon Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism when I find myself in a state like this (I go to this book for many other reasons besides). I’ve been thinking recently of returning to Ray Monk’s extraordinary biography of Wittgenstein and moving through that again. For poetry, Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, Brenda Hillman, Xi Chuan and a few others.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
I have had two homes for several years, Saskatchewan and Vancouver Island. For the Island, the smell of a winter forest – snowberries, douglas fir. Saskatchewan: dry native grass. Dirt.

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 read randomly in science (archeology, neurology, cosmology; a friend who’s a microbiologist has set me on to various things), but I know in fact next to nothing in any of these areas. Mystical theology, neo-platonism – an important book for me over the last few years has been Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. My partner is a curator, and I go to many art openings. I have found, from a compositional point of view, I have learned more from visual artists – Janet Werner, Rebecca Belmore, Rick Raxlen, Grant McConnell, Jan Wyers – than I have from poets. If they can make this elision on canvas or in the performance space, why can’t I do something comparable on the page?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? 
I guess I’ve taken a stab at this question above. The work of Jan Zwicky remains important to me. Osip Mandelstam. Andrew Sukanski, as you know, has been saying things to me for over thirty years. Many, many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? 
Can’t say. Things just turn up. I wouldn’t mind writing an opera, I guess, or at least a more conventional one than the masque/opera for chant in Assiniboia. I am attracted to spectacle. Orghast, R. Murray Schafer. But, no, no particular ambition. Just whatever presents itself. This is part of the thrill, not knowing.

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 used to work as a farm labourer, and I kind of miss that. There were parts of religious life I liked. But teaching and writing, walking, looking, waiting, conversation when I can scare it up seem to be the best for me.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
 Hard to say, really. It wasn’t a choice. It was just something urging, insistent inside.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
 Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knut Rasmussen. I just finished Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I loved that world.

20 - What are you currently working on? Now that Assiniboia is finished as far as I am concerned, I’m turning my full attention to two projects, an essay collection that I’d like to call The Larger Conversation, politics, contemplation and so forth, that would go with Going Home and Living in the World As If It Were Home. I’m also deeply engaged with some new poems, more autobiographical, shorter, exploring parts of my past I’ve put off thinking a great deal about. And also I’m quite intrigued by the phenomenon of the mythopoeic war.

Tim Lilburn reads next in Ottawa on Saturday, March 3, 2012 as part of Ottawa's second annual VERSeFest poetry festival.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

Vocation means, of course, a call. Diplomas are written, vocations are spoken. To find a vocation means to be summoned: called to exceed your qualifications, whatever they may be; called to explore and to fulfill your capabilities. Those who have vocations inhabit a world where doing and being are one and the same because continuous learning unites them. I have learned, as a frequent visitor to universities, that the university itself is often such a world, for its students as much as for its faculty—and that one of the greater challenges of life in North America today is not so much to find as to maintain one's vocation after leaving university. ("The Vocation of Being," pp 47-48)

Much like the work of prairie poet Tim Lilburn, I find the essays by British Columbia poet and thinker Robert Bringhurst far more compelling than his work as a poet; not to say that he isn’t an accomplished poet, he has published numerous works as both poet and translator of poetry, including The Calling: Selected Poems 1970-1995 (1987), Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1987), and a translation of Ghandl's Nine Visits to the Mythworld, which was nominated for the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. As well, for years a book designer, including many McClelland & Stewart titles over the years, his book The Elements of Typographic Style is said to be one of the most influential texts on typographic design (I know for a fact that greenboathouse books editor/publisher Jason Dewinetz considers the book to be essential to the point of Biblical). I haven’t seen that book, but where I am completely taken with the words and ideas of Robert Bringhurst is in his most recent book, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006).

In a series of essays originally delivered as talks to various audiences throughout a decade of lecturing, Bringhurst talks through and about the history of languages and cultures and, in the first essay, presents the argument that if you are studying Native North American literature, you should, just as anyone would learn Latin or Greek in an equivalent class in the classics, have to learn a Native North American language. It's actually an argument so simple that it becomes completely overlooked otherwise, and completely brilliant. Bringhurst works his lectures from a point of not only respect and pure education, but from that place of passionate learning for its own sake, wanting to know more about the world around him because that is how the world responds to him. As he writes as part of that first essay:

I would like to go back now, for a moment, to the map of Canada.

A literary map of this country would be first of all a map of languages, several layers deep. On the base layers, there would be no sign at all of English and French. At least sixty-five, perhaps as many as eighty, different languages, of at least ten different major families, were spoken in this country when Jacques Cartier arrived. Each and every one of them had a history and a literature. It is with them, or what remains of them, that the study of Canadian literature must start. So the question is, what does remain?

I have been chided once or twice for using the phrase "the Haida holocaust." To me the term seems apt. The Haida lost more than ninety per cent of their population in less than a century. In Haida Gwaii the epidemics that brought this about are still, as they should be, a sensitive subject. Any suggestion that others have suffered as much – even comparisons to the experience of the Jews – can cause offense. But this is not at all an isolated case. In 1492, there were perhaps ten million people in the are we know now as the USA and Canada. By 1900, the census figures tell us, the total aboriginal population in this same vast stretch of country was much less than half a million. Decimated is too mild a word. While the colonial population has risen steeply in both countries, the total indigenous population has shrunk by a factor of twenty-five or thirty. Disease had a lot to do with it – smallpox, measles, cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever. These were abetted, of course, by repeated eviction and forced relocation, and by deliberate diseducation, massive destruction of resources and, in consequence, outright starvation. Declared or not, a war was going on. And its most effective weapons, whether or not anyone ever intended to use them as such, were biological. ("The Polyphonic Mind," pp 24-25)

After spending many hours with this collection, I would very much like to find a copy of his previous collection of essays, The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing & Meaning (Wolfville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2004). Anyone who is interested in the form of language and not only how we got there, but what we should be doing with it should read this book; and multiple readings are a must. Without preaching but with prodding, he tells us how we are supposed to learn to keep ourselves alive.

Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems, 30th Anniversary Edition

Homestead, 1914 (Sec. 32, TP4, RG2, W3RD, Sask.)

I returning

for the third spring in a row now
i return to visit father in his yorkton shack
the first time i returned to see him
he was a bit spooked
seeing me after eleven years –
a bindertwine held up his pants then
that year he was still a fairly tough little beggar
and we shouted to the storm fighting
to see who would carry my flightbag across the cn tracks
me crying: for chrissake father
lemme carry the damn thing the
train’s already too close!

now in his 83rd year father fails
is merely 110 pounds now and cries while
telling me of a growing pain after the fall
from a cn freightcar
in the yard where he works unofficially as a cleanup man
tells of how the boss that day
slipped a crisp 20 into his pocket and said:
you vill be okay meester shoonatzki
dont tell anyvon about dis
commeh bek in coopleh veek time . . .
father says his left testicle has shriveled
to the size of a shelled walnut
says there’s simply no fucking way
he’ll see another doctor – says:
the last von trried to shine a penlight up myne ass
sohn
no von everr look up myne asshole
an neverr vill
neverr!

while we walk through the spring blizzard to the depot
i note how he is bent even more now
and i think: . . . they will have to break is back
to lay im flat when he dies

in the depot
father guards my bag while i buy two white owl cigars
and return to give him one
and then embrace saying goodbye
and i watch him walk away from me
finally disappearing in the snowflake eddy near a pine
on the street corner
and then remember how he stood beneath a single lightbulb
hanging from a frayed cord in his shack
remember how he said
myne life now moveh to end vit speed of
letrica

Thirty years after it was originally published, comes Saskatchewan poet Andrew Suknaski's first trade poetry collection Wood Mountain Poems (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2006), with a new introduction by Tim Lilburn, launched a couple of weeks ago at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words in Moose Jaw. Originally edited by Al Purdy, who had seen Suknaski's work and included it in the first Storm Warning anthology (1971), Wood Mountain Poems has long been considered one of the most important prairie poets over the past few decades, yet Suknaski's work has predominantly been out of print for years now, and Suknaski too, out of commission, living in a group home in Moose Jaw. An important book in the prairies, the back cover writes that "As fresh and relevant as when first published, Wood Mountain Poems is one of the first books from Canadian prairie literature to examine the division and shared experience between European settlers and Aboriginal peoples. In these poems we gain insight into the lives of historical figures such as Sitting Bull, Crowfoot and Gabriel Dumont." Even Ottawa writer and editor Armand Garnet Ruffo told me recently that it was Wood Mountain Poems and the cover image of Sitting Bull that gave him permission to write his own poems, about his own native heritage. As Lilburn writes in his introduction:

The first publication of Wood Mountain Poems in 1976 marked a beginning in the de-colonization of the West Canadian literary imagination — many have remarked on this; we were emboldened to think our own stories were worth telling, our own talk worth writing down. The book appears now an act of courage that made much possible: whole careers, a literature. Ginsberg called Whitman the old courage-giver; the same could be said of Suknaski in Wood Mountain Poems. Whitman's example gave Ginsberg a range of formational permissions — on volume; line lengths; the pilings of words; themes; on gayness; suppleness of association; on routine transgression: because of Wood Mountain Poems, a door opened in Western Canadian poetry to bar talk, tall farmer tales, and a spirit of bricolage in making. We'll build our own way of writing, we said to ourselves, up from our kitchen tables — and so we did.

Suknaski's ferality is also Whitmanic: his work attends to no pattern; instruction in the great cultural paradigms has not transfixed him; he's heard other things and followed them. He camped out on his own. Genius often comes from the margins; the understanding of one's land, the reading of one's place in one's locale, comes from the margins. Saskatchewan's two universities have contributed astonishingly little to the development of a regional literature, even less to the European settler task of mixing what Europe knew with what was on the plains in order to become "of" this place. Far more of spiritual and political benefit has come from Wood Mountain Poems and from the paintings of such "primitives" as Jan Wyers of Windthorst and W.C. McCargar of Balgonie. The roughness of Suknaski makes his poems, to my ear, seem even more elementally us than either Who Has Seen the Wind or Wolf Willow.

I've been doing my own Suknaski work over the past six years, editing a new edition of selected poems, scheduled for next spring with Chaudiere Books, There is No Mountain: Selected Poems of Andrew Suknaski (which should be one of the few trade books of his to include any of his visual works, hopefully up to about forty pages of), as well as a collection of essays forthcoming with Guernica Editions, Andrew Suknaski: Essays on His Works [see the long piece I wrote on Suknaski for the collection up at Poetics.ca]. Through the process of going through as much Suknaski as I could find, I even accidentally put together the collection Nebulous medicine: the essays, statements and reviews of Andrew Suknaski (forthcoming, tba). If there are any pieces out there I might have missed, or pieces yet to be written on his works, please let me know.

Hopefully the stores will be filled with this new edition. Otherwise, check out Hagios Press c/o Box 33024, Cathedral P.O., Regina Saskatchewan S4T 7X2, ph: (306) 352 6944 or email them at hagiospress@accesscomm.ca