The Unmemntioable, Erín Moure

I’ve decided to take E.M. for my experimental subject. She’s here and she’s a pest; she might as well serve some useful purpose. And she has an inner forum, and recalls an infancy, an infans before speaking.

As for me, I am better off without either.

Montreal poet and translator Erín Moure’s new poetry collection, The Unmemntioable (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2012) continues a number of threads in her work over the past few years, from translation, border-crossings and her increasingly-constant companion, collaborator, foil and hetronym (in the Pessoa sense) Elisa Sampedrín. In The Unmemntioable, Moure includes a study of Sampedrín alongside her own grief, taking her mother’s ashes to (as the back cover writes) “the village where her maternal family was erased by war and time. There, watching E.M. through the trees in a downpour, an idea came to her: she would use E.M. to research the nature of Experience.” The nature of experience, as the book explores it, is multi-faceted, and somehow complex enough that it actually becomes more readable. How does that happen?

My intention was just to write at the desk in Bucureşti, but this notebook paper turns into a plant again damp with sap and fibre and breaks the nib. Perfumes anarchic tendency and a way with words, fallen down on crested birds.

“The smell of hay at the look of god”

the pen writes.

“We wept our gifts for you, dear mother, our treasures. Waking up in the night and wringing out the shirt. Even then, the tumor was growing in the blood.”

(Tomasz’s shadow bent long from the doorway to the forest, but it’s just the noise of darkness and the gate banging shut in wind)

This notebook is arresting sleep (lying face-down in a pool of snow). When I look up, a siren, and the light of the ambulance flashes off the walls at it streaks down Matei Voievod in the dark…. but who does it carry? And repeatedly? E.M.? Has she eaten a peanut again?

Over the course of Moure’s trilogy of poetry books O Cidadán (Anansi, 2002), O Cadoiro, poems (Anansi, 2007) and O Resplendor (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2010), as well as her Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005), where we first met the writer and translator Sampedrín, Moure has worked increasingly complex book-length collages of essay-poems, lyrics, arguments, questions and prose-lines, all while adding layers and nuance to Elisa Sampedrín. It is as though Moure works hard to diminish or even erase the narrator/author, even while building up the hetronym of Sampedrín. And why is Sampedrín so argumentative in this collection? We’ve seen Sampedrín be argumentative before, certainly, challenging the narrator in all sorts of ways, but this collection almost sees Moure’s hetronym downright hostile in places. Exactly what is happening between the narrator and hetronym, two elements of the author herself? It would seem that, although the questioning is sometimes harsh, the collaborations remain.

Where Moure’s previous trilogy focused on “the citizen,” her new collection, The Unmemntioable, turns the same gaze sideways, writing out her mother’s Ukrainian background quite specifically, and exploring how the experience of this particular citizen and her forebears produced the woman that Moure knew as her own mother.

If anything, it’s the fault of reading. When Chus Pato’s poetry appeared on my desk, I decided to give up writing poems. I moved to Bucureşti to see if I could free myself from this crisis of experience, this excision of language. Then I saw Erín Moure in the park at a café table, looking at me. Why did she come here?

What does she know about experience? Her mother tongues resist all attempts at a technical language.

Is it that she has no mother tongue?

Today, I refuse to be pinned down to an identity. Right away, I want to betray it.

Through her mother’s death and the exploration of her and her family’s history, the blend of narrative, fragment, language and translation weave throughout in a remarkably natural and fluid way, all of which could be boiled down to Moure’s interior monologue. Scribbled down in moleskins while travelling, the book concludes with what, on the surface, reads like a prose memoir of travel. These are sketches possibly even composed in that café in Bucureşti, perhaps, writing out and through the geography of her mother’s family that read as deep, meditative and as personal as, say, Brian Fawcett’s Human happiness (2012) or Susan Howe’s That this (2011):

Dear Chus: everything I had dreamed turned out to be made of paper. The skin was an organ that suffered in silence the rays, the scourges, the cuts of trees and medicine. In Hlibovychi in 1922, the war was over but the repressions escalated. Predeceased by her father Oleks, now with more children, my grandmother Anastasia emigrated with Tomasz in 1929, to NW14.72.9.W6. Riding down the south side of the mountain, the side with a road, the smallest daughter, my mother, went to school.

Forderung. “We must press forward to the schools.”

In the innermost core of blinded love, with is and must never be realized, a woman is trying to open her eyes to see.

* * *

Though my mother is gone, her face still claims me. In the morning I write wearing her cancer hat. I wear her Western belt to Whitehorse. In my pocket, she stands at the summit cairn in Wonder Pass with her friends the nurses. They wear anoraks and sunhats. Maybe one day, as she did, I will wear her blue ribbed hat, the knitted one, as hair.

Moure has composed a book that furthers her ongoing explorations in language, translation and identity as well as writing out a tribute to her mother and her mother’s history. “A mother is the unmemntioable boundary / that can never come fully clear.”

Andrew Suknaski: July 30, 1942 - May 3, 2012

Lanterns

the blizzard came

after the first frost —

the hired man left the house

with a lantern

to see how the cattle

were taking the storm

in the north pasture

my father found him

three days later

near the fence on the east side

of the pasture

the faithful dog froze

beside him — curled up

like a lover in the man's arms

(the broken lantern

lay near a stone        the glass shattered)

men freeze this way everywhere

when lanterns fall    a p a r t

(even within one's arms

inside the city's rim)

Prairie poet Andrew Suknaski, known as “the poet of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan,” died of natural causes in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, on Wednesday, May 3, 2012. Of Ukrainian and Polish decent, he was born on his parent’s homestead near Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan in 1942, left home at sixteen, returned, left home again, and repeated over the next twenty years before making it to Regina, and finally to a group home in Moose Jaw in the 1980s. In the years that followed his first departure, he worked as a migrant worker, travelled through Europe and Australia, and attended Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, eventually falling under the wing of Vancouver poet Earle Birney. He also studied at the Kootenay School of Art in the British Columbia interior, as well as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design. Through heavy amounts of publishing in small press publications and elsewhere starting in the late 1960s, as well as his own Elfin Plot Press, he caught the eye of Ontario poet and editor Al Purdy, who included Suknaski's poems in his first Storm Warning Anthology (1970), before editing what would become Suknaski's first trade and most famous poetry collection, Wood Mountain Poems (1976). He was the subject of a documentary film by Harvey Spak for the National Film Board, and was writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1978. Anyone in the prairies older than their mid-40s not only knows of the work of Andrew Suknaski, but might even consider him an influence, through years of his work being taught from out-of-date anthologies. Until his first trade collection Wood Mountain Poems, edited by Al Purdy for MacMillan, was reissued by Regina's Hagios Press as a thirtieth anniversary edition in 2006, almost everything of Suknaski's had long been out of print. Working through Andrew Suknaski's poems, the collection Wood Mountain Poems wasn’t a beginning, as many readers have come to see it, but almost a mid-point in his writing career, moving into text and away from the visual poems that made up a large part of his first decade. Still, despite his years of producing visuals and chapbooks and publishing and distributing across the country, the first few lines of his long poem "Homestead, 1914 (Sec. 32, TP4, RG2, W3RD, Sask.)," the first poem in Wood Mountain Poems, and reprinted innumerable times in anthologies (much the way George Bowering's poem "grandfather" had been, from a decade earlier), was the first, and sometimes only reflection that any reader saw of the work of Andrew Suknaski.

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!

For years starting in the late 1960s and further into the 1980s, Andrew Suknaski was one of the most prolific, energetic and influential poets in the prairies, travelling and writing, making poems out of drawings and words and cigar tubes and kites, and producing chapbooks and magazines as he went. Suknaski, more than anyone else, became the face of prairie poetry to a multitude of writers, readers and other admirers. What happened, you might ask? He was a combination of friend and contemporary, student and mentor to more than one generation of writer across the country, including Eli Mandel, Barry McKinnon, Gary Hyland, John Newlove, Patrick Lane, Al Purdy, Kristjana Gunnars, Dennis Cooley, Robert Kroetsch, Mick Burrs, Dennis Lee, Tim Lander, Mike Olito, Robert Currie, Catherine Hunter, Jars Balan, bill bissett, bpNichol, George Morrissette, Stephen Scobie, Smaro Kamboureli, Linda Rogers and so many others. As an author, he produced eight trade poetry collections and dozens of chapbooks; as a publisher, dozens more. Suknaski's poems were written as stories about the land and the people that lived there, working their way toward myth, and the myth of the place, even as he told the "real story" of various residents of the village of Wood Mountain. Like his friend John Newlove, Suknaski was one of the first too write any stories about the Native peoples in that part of the country, well before it would have been considered "voice appropriation," and helped more than a few other writers open up to tell their own stories down the road. There is a particular kind of deceptively simple prairie plainspeak that Suknaski seemed to perfect in his poems, and one that is repeated by many of the writers that came after him, but often without the kind of nuance that Suknaski was known for, through his series of seemingly endless departures and returns. As Scobie wrote in the introduction to Suknaski's previous selected poems, The Land They Gave Away (1982):

Suknaski has had an immense influence upon the development of Prairie poetry over the last ten years. This "anecdotal" style has become an orthodoxy, and, in the hands of less skillful writers, a cliché. Suknaski's best work retains the energy and vitality of the speech he is quoting ― but the danger of the style is that the poetic rhythms will go flat and dull, producing only some mildly interesting short stories which might just as well be told in prose.

Suknaski's poems continually return to that edge to acknowledge the stories around him that might otherwise have been lost, writing of his own family histories and those of friends and neighbours, to various of the other nations and nationalities around him, including the immediate Sioux (ever aware of his immigrant guilt), the Chinese, Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, and various others of the native peoples. It is important to note that the word "honour" is repeated throughout his poems, as is the word "remember." Suknaski does remember, including stories of Big Bear, Sitting Bull and Crowfoot, Gabriel Dumont and the Teton Sioux, much in the way other writers, such as his friend, the poet John Newlove also did, another Saskatchewan poet who left the land, but, unfortunately, was unable to return (he considered himself a Saskatchewan poet for the rest of his life). For Suknaski, perpetually leaving and returning, the land itself is important to him, from his father and mother as well as the physicality of his home base of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan (elevation 1,013 metres), close to the Cypress Hills (the highest point between Labrador and the Rocky Mountains), site of the infamous Cypress Hills massacre.

There is a line by Eurpides that the late poet Irving Layton referenced when he wrote his "Birthday Poem for John Newlove" that could also apply to Andrew Suknaski, writing "Whom the gods do not intend to destroy / they first make mad with poetry." In her piece "Essay Parcels from Andrew Suknaski" from the anthology Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (1986), prairie writer Kristjana Gunnars wrote of receiving dozens of packages of poems and bread (made from the ash of Suknaski burning his papers) from Suknaski, the bulk of which she couldn’t even bring herself to open, writing "The artist is a poet. It was as I had feared. The artist was mad." In a piece that doesn’t really show the best side of either, she starts the short piece with:

It was April when the parcels started arriving. The snow was melting. Yellow grass could be seen by the fence. I went home after work one evening. Opened the screen door. Two large thin parcels fell to my feet. The postman hid them between doors.

I did not open the parcels. They went into the basement. Next day four cards in the mailbox. Four more parcels at the St. Norbert post office. I picked them up. Not because I wanted them, but because of the Francophone clerk. He was so excited.

Those parcels went into the car trunk. There they stayed, unopened. When the warm weather came a great perfumed smell arose from one of the packages. When I got into the car it made me think of a field of tulips in Amsterdam.

Andrew Suknaski once said that he got the same amount for his papers that his father got for the homestead (where Suknaski's sister is still buried), a total of five thousand dollars for each. according to the University of Manitoba website, “in 1987, having wearied of transporting his personal papers during his frequent moves, Suknaski burned twenty years of records in a bonfire in his backyard. What remains of his papers encompasses the years 1977-1972. The collection comprises 15 linear feet. There are drafts of many of his published works as well as correspondence with literary fugures like Eli Mandel, John Newlove, Robert Kroetsch and Kristjana Gunnars.[…] Perhaps the most valuable portion of the collection are the unpublished manuscripts that Suknaski worked on during the 1980s, including “Divining the West,” “Ussuri Line” and “In Search of Parinti/History of the Roumanians in Western Canada.” When he began having difficulties in the 1980s, he joined a select group of Canadian writers, poets considered the best at their craft, who, for whatever reason, had stopped writing (or at least, stopped publishing), including Montreal poets Peter van Toorn and the late Artie Gold, the late Toronto poet Ed Lacey, British Columbia poet David Phillips, and Ottawa poet William Hawkins. Over the last twenty-five years of his life, Suknaski lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, not far from his original home of Wood Mountain, and not far from his close friend Gary Hyland, who long looked after his affairs until he died a few short years ago.

My biggest regret is that the book I’ve spent twelve years working on, There Is No Mountain: Selected Poems of Andrew Suknaski, hadn’t yet appeared in time for him to see it. After many complications and hurdles, an individual came forward yesterday to help fund the production, but now waits for the appointment of a literary excecuter before proceeding.

An Ottawa memorial is currently being organized for Friday, June 1 at The Carleton Tavern, as is a Montreal memorial, hosted by Brian Sentes.

Related links: Brian Sentes’ obituary for Andrew Suknaski; the essay I wrote on Andrew Suknaski up at Poetics.ca

Two Calls for Submissions: 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award + Leaf Press

Call for Submissions: Leaf Press
Leaf Press is gathering poems for an anthology about the newly born, the almost born, the journey in-between. We are interested in thresholds and liminal states; in moments that transcend global cultures. We welcome poems from all the continents, asking only that they be accompanied by a translation to English. We may be able to help, in some instances, with translations. Please send your poem to: poems@leafpress.ca, subject line: Newborns or to: Leaf Press, Box 416, Lantzville, B.C. V0R 2H0.

We will accept poems that have been previously published. Poets must provide this information (publication, publishing house and date) as well as permission for us to reprint. Leaf plans to publish the anthology in Spring 2014. Deadline: January 30, 2013. Anthology Editors: Ann Graham Walker and Ursula Vaira. Selected poets will be paid a fee of $50.00 CAD plus a copy of the book.

Call for submissions: 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award
A $2000 prize will be awarded for the poetry chapbook judged to be the best submitted. Interested authors or publishers should submit three copies of a chapbook of poetry in English published in Canada in 2011. Chapbooks should be no less than 10 pages and no more than 48 pages. Submissions should include a brief C.V. of the author, plus address, telephone number, and email address. Send to: Meet the Presses / bpNichol Chapbook Award, PO Box 26, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S6. The closing date for submissions to the 2012 competition is May 31, 2012. Please email Meet The Presses for more information: meetthepresses@gmail.com.

Profile of Collected Work Bookstore and Coffebar, now up at Open Book: Ontario,

My profile of Ottawa's Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar [photo by Ashliegh Gehl] is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

new from above/ground press: new titles by Clarke, MillAr + Robertson,

Selected Canticles

George Elliott Clarke

$4

See link here for more information

THE SHINY THINGS

Jay MillAr

$4

See link here for more information

On Physical Real Beginnings and What Happens Next

Lisa Robertson

$4

See link here for more information

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

April 2012

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

See previous batch of above/ground press items here, another here, another here, another here and afurther here. Check www.abovegroundpress.blogspot.ca for regular updates, and sidebar links for chapbooks, “poem” broadsides, author interviews and a small stack of recent reviews, and The Factory Reading Series (including Joe Blades and Nicholas Lea onThursday). Review copies available.

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Lisa Samuels

Lisa Samuels's recent books are Mama Mortality Corridos (Holloway 2010) and Gender City (Shearsman 2011); Anti M (Chax) and Press the image (Shearsman) are due out this year. She recently finished a CD version (reading + soundscapes) of Tomorrowland, her 2009 book from Shearsman, and an experimental novel called Tender Girl. Since 2006, she has lived in New Zealand, teaching at The University of Auckland; in 2012 she will be based temporarily in Spain.

Auckland, New Zealand, April 2012

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
O Books published The Seven Voices in 1998, and Leslie Scalapino’s wanting to bring out my poetry was extraordinary to me. I had a chapbook with Meow Press in 1996, and I liked that too, an offertory that rapidly etherized, but The Seven Voices was more of a book-making experience. Assembling poetic orders, choosing cover images, those sorts of paratexts became part of my poetry making for the first time. Also I finished my PhD in 1997 and was in the second of two one-year Visiting Assistant Professorships when The Seven Voices came out. Its existence made me a more serious applicant as a poet-critic, and in that sense The Seven Voices helped me get jobs. I never planned to be an academic creative writer – modernism and poetics and literary theory are what I trained in – but the poet-critic jobs I got began re-wiring my working identity.

In terms of comparing my recent and previous writing, it depends on where you pick up the edges. I edited two critical volumes in 1997 and 2001, and in that same period I was publishing essays about poetry and critical practice. Then Pavement Saw published my post 9/11 book, War Holdings (2003), whose poems are explicitly focused on war and governmental body traumas. That thematic focus differs from the mixed poems of The Seven Voices. When I say “focus” I mean I have books that explicitly hang together and books whose pieces jut out in different directions. My 2005 and 2008 Shearsman books, Paradise for Everyone and The Invention of Culture, and my forthcoming Press the image (Shearsman 2012), are admixtures of poems – they jut out toward violence, cultural identities, love, sensory perceptions, genre blasts, law and other imperatives, limits and breakages of English language and poetic form, animality, event apprehension, context shift, discursive power – and so they resemble my first book in that way.

Intervening books, however, differ markedly: Mama Mortality Corridos (Holloway 2010) is death-focused and hinged with Spanish and concept drawings, and Tomorrowland and Gender City (Shearsman 2009 and 2011) are booklength poems that investigate transmigration, cross-temporal and cross-cultural event structures, and urban identity phantasmagoria. My 2009 pamphlet Throe (Oystercatcher Press) turns on coloniality and movements of bodies and beliefs – I think it both hangs together in its throes and juts apart in its pieces. My creative non-fiction book Anti M, due out with Chax Press, is an “omitted prose” work produced over a long period of time, and my new CDs of Tomorrowland (Deep Surface 2012) feature soundscapes I did with instruments and voice. That work is quite distinct from the textual and page play of The Seven Voices.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Fictive utterances principally engage language to assist in building micro-worlds. Non-fiction tends to rely on language to verify some strings that hold us in the world and the world in us. Poetry trends to linguistic density and attention, to how language makes us know how we know in and out of language, and to imagining what we don’t know. Because I am most transacted by the latter equations, I write poetry. Even there, however, even with those gestural definitions: I don’t believe in them so much as see them operate in western genre distinctions.

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?
Naturally any answer depends on the project. Anti M started many years ago in very different form from the Chax Press version. I turned it from a raw manuscript called Numbers into a fictive version called Adorno’s Purple Bus and then into a stripped-out “omitted prose” version. By contrast, Tomorrowland happened unplanned and rapidly when I had a semester of leave in 2008: thanks to Forrest Gander, I was at Brown as a visiting researcher, but with no real institutional commitments. I was able to write every day – at least when I was not working on a commissioned Leslie Scalapino essay or taking care of my then three year old son. The material that became Gender City happened in the same period, when I felt I could continue writing at epic length about the things I was thinking about – but because I had to go back to work in New Zealand I was not able to continue that writing nor to shape the second book right away. I had to sit down at various times over the next couple of years to compile the material that became Gender City. 

4 - 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?
I can certainly be transacted by an unscheduled poem, as with, say, “The rack of consent” or “Mouth.” Other times I compile from a focused event, as with “Increment, a family romance,” or I self-pastiche from fragments, and so on. Those kinds of writings get gathered into books rather than being planned as books. Other times I write toward books, which is how Tomorrowland and Gender City and Anti M happened, and how I am now writing Life Sentence.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
In the late 1990s I could not understand poetry readings in relation to the textualisms of my writing. In trying to adapt to what seemed to be the necessity of giving readings, then, I turned to poems whose followability suited what poetry readings seemed to call for.

Increasingly, I have come to appreciate poetry performance, and in the last few years I’ve started to relish it. I like making voice and unleashing some of the dramatic polylogisms in my writing. I’m also starting to use musical instruments: for recent readings at Illinois State and Louisiana State, I performed a long-ish poem, “Sub rosa,” that I had scored with parts to be spoken or sung into the f-hole of my viola. Thanks to Duriel Harris and Laura Mullen, who were my hosts, I was able to borrow violins at both places for that part of my performances (with thanks also to Susan and Afton: the violin owners!). 

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 hope my theoretical concerns are not behind my writing, unless the paper is really thin so you can see through it! I hope my writing constantly enacts my theoretical obsessions. A broad brush characterization of those obsessions is semiotics, materialism, and phenomenology. Another answer is ethics, gender, identity, cultural construction. Another answer is the invention of the nation state and the gathering of persons according to rhetorics, regions, topography, and habit. Another answer is how language enacts what world(s). Another answer is the relation of skin to paper to physical word to body fluids to sound to binding and versioning and performance. Politics + flesh + relation prompt my thinking about “membranism.”  Another answer is my grief that people want to stabilize culture and identity to live in a dream of naturalized givens.

The digitas is a buoyant inhabitation that re-frames these questions and mirrors back out. I think the Occupy movement is directly related to western expectations that museums, for one example, should now give visitors response and co-making options, as digital realms do. How to bridge co-making and response structures to tap into the civitas part of the digitas re-frame – in other words how to be truly active voices in current civil government decisions – is a fence that the Occupy movement was and is still pushing against. Imagine houses of government as beta freeware being co-made by civic users who understand themselves as co-makers.

Well, would we have time for anything else, you might ask? That is a fair question in the context of a world whose seven billion inhabitants mostly cannot ask that question. The destructively vanishing horizon of the possibility of civic life for most people on the planet is another theoretical concern – that ties in with eco-poetics in evading despair by paying attention and by making.

I think my concerns are zeitgeist concerns, and in that sense they are all germane to “the current questions.”   

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 question poses a singular version of “the writer” – I mean that is the term you use. I cannot observe “the writer” in “larger culture”; I see multiple writers doing multiple things in multiple cultural contexts. Some writers mean to entertain, some to inform, some to provoke, assure, witness, explain, control, observe, tally, recreate, change, challenge, and on the list can go. I can only think multiplicities as responses to this question. See for example my 2009 essay-under-pressure “333 types of poetic mimesis in 999 words” (in Murray Edmond’s literary journal Ka Mate Ka Ora) for one vertical core sample of one aspect of one genre.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have more often been the editorial reader, suggesting how to organize language material for optimal versions of desired creative or critical effects. I have not had much detailed editorial response for anything I’ve written, so I can only reckon it is essential to work with editors when one can or must. I did work with Leslie Scalapino on an essay I wrote about her writing, and with the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management when I edited Anarchism Is Not Enough; but those are special cases, people invested in the critical framing of work rather than editors.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Live, live all you can; it’s a great mistake not to.” (Henry James in The Ambassadors)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The appeal is that each one is REM sleep for the other. The appeal is that critical prose is straitjacketed quicksilver and poetry is maximally constellated theory. The appeal is that code switching opportunities be multiplied. The appeal is that I want critical prose to be permitted to be written in any fashion that delineates an area of attention and poetry to be permitted to be written in any fashion that delineates affective cognition around and in relation to areas of attention.  

The ease is another question. I am happy to move between those two supposed genres, but it can be hard for my poetry to serve as the theory I transact it (feel it, think it, want it) to be and hard for my critical prose to be accepted as the embodied and situated conversation I transact it to be. However, I have been overall fortunate in finding jobs and publishers that permit me to keep trying, so I am grateful for that.

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?
A typical day begins with my 7 year old son Rowan waking me up and wanting to talk and play. My partner and I get Rowan ready for school; I go to my academic job at The University of Auckland.

I have learned to write whenever I can. I write in notebooks and on computer. I write when I am listening to lectures – writing as listening is a good kinetic for me when the context calls for the decorum of passivity – and when I have that rare event of an hour to think in a morning. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
It took me a while to turn into this version of myself, but as I am now I do not have the experience of my writing getting stalled. The only thing that prevents me near my writing is time to get projects done. Certainly I enjoy it when I am reading something and it makes me want to put it down and write – I think of that kind of writing as “writing back”.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
I don’t remember. My last costume was for a child’s pirate birthday party on a beach in Auckland. I wore various garb from various distant cultures to make up a pirate effect.

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 made one or two hundred drawings over the southern summer when I was putting together Mama Mortality Corridos. The drawings were difficult for me to make because I was contemplating specific deaths, because I drew to a very restricted frame, and because I “cannot draw”: Mama Mortality is obsessed with death, which we cannot “do” (we can “commit” suicide, but we can’t “do” death). I found the intensity of drawing to be in completely unregulated relation with the resulting drawn thing, not unlike composition slipping in relation with the composed. 

One thing I like to do is tinker with the piano – also sometimes with viola, ukulele, guitar, harmonica, and thumb piano, all of which we have at home. The piano, though, comes easiest to me as a compositional device. I cannot play it properly: I make sounds, chords, extensions, patterns. When I do this intensely it feels akin to the transaction of writing and can propel me into writing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Kathy Acker, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, William Blake, Kamau Brathwaite, Alan Brunton, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Bill Griffiths, Carla Harryman, Marjorie Kempe, Myung Mi Kim, Henri Lefebvre, Mina Loy, Nathaniel Mackey, George Meredith, Adelaide Morris, Geraldine Monk, Harryette Mullen, bp Nichol, Friedrich Nietzsche, Julian of Norwich, Maggie O’Sullivan, Charles Sanders Peirce, Georges Perec, Tom Phillips, Laura Riding, Lisa Robertson, Leslie Scalapino, Carolee Schneemann, Wallace Stevens, William Vollmann, Anne Waldman, Slavoj Zizek. There are others.  

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
The question implies the resolute possibility of actually doing that thing I would like to do that I have not yet. So my realist answer is that I would like to push forward on projects that are in my mind and computer. I have two digital projects that I have not fit into a presented world of work; my desires for those are larger than my time for them. I have given talks not turned into available print. I have digital footage for film-poems I haven’t yet made. That sort of thing.

I suppose a fictive-world answer would be that I would like to spend some years in a cohort of intense people working on creative and critical projects in relation to multiple media. It is greedy of me to want to work in a think-tank co-operative conversing makingcosm like that, but it’s a creative greed so it might be forgiven.

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?
A realist answer is that I would be interested in being part of a traveling research team investigating how cultural ethics (educational opportunities, gender laws, support for non-monetary cultural activities) are managed in relation to regional organizations of people. Perhaps that describes an NGO job.

A fictive-world answer is that I would like to have been a physicist working in relation to dynamics of matter. Or a foley artist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
An urge to engage with meaning-making material. Language is our most crucial tool for being in relation to knowing and not-knowing. I like being involved with its possibilities.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I am allergic to the monumentalizing of the word “great.” One favorite book of recent years has been Alan Halsey’s The Text of Shelley’s Death. A splendid example of a creative enactment of the impossibility of “certain” “history.”

Since becoming a mother I see very few cinema films; those I see that I like register as intelligent entertainment rather than as work that moves my thinking to a different set. When I have time to think films I look at ubuweb, which your question has just prompted me to do: I watched the 1983 Peter Greenaway film on John Cage, wonderful in sound, over-voice, footage, determination, and story – “My problems have become social rather than musical.” And funnily enough Cage tells the story of being in sixth grade and overhearing his father tell his mother to get ready to go to New Zealand on Saturday. The sixth-grader Cage gets ready to go, Saturday comes – and the project is never mentioned again. The whole film gets funnier and funnier. Maybe because I came to New Zealand in much the same way, except we actually went! 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I recently finished an experimental novel, Tender Girl, whose starting premise comes from an episode in Lautréamont’s 1868 book Les Chants de Maldoror in which the human hero copulates with a female shark in the stormy seas of a shipwreck where sailors are dying around them. Tender Girl invents a daughter as their offspring, and the book is a modular picaresque in which Girl emerges from the sea to travel across land for its experiences. I am also working to put together an edited volume titled A TransPacific Poetics: Sawako Nakayasu came out to Auckland last year and we put out a call for work and are pushing for new pieces to add in. I’m also working gradually on Modernism Is Not Enough, a collection of my essays on critical practice and poetries, and gradually on Life Sentence, an increasingly lengthy work. I will be based in Spain for the second half of 2012, for research leave, and I reckon an unexpected project will join those others – that’s what happened during my last leave, and we’ll be next to Ávila so I’m hoping I can go see those Interior Castles.    

12 or 20 (second series) questions;