12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Lithgow

Michael Lithgow is a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication. His poetry has appeared in Arc Magazine, The New Quarterly and Fiddlehead. Selections of his work have been included in Rutting Season (Buffalo Runs Press, 2009) and Undercurrents: New Voices in Canadian Poetry (Cormorant Books, 2010).  His first solo collection, Waking in the Tree House, was published in Spring 2012 by Cormorant Books. He is currently a contributing editor at ArtThreat.net, research associate with the Canadian Alternative Media Archive project, and director of OpenMedia.ca.  His doctoral research explores aesthetics, truth and dissent in digital and performance cultures.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It didn’t – my first chapbook, I mean.  Neither did my second one. My chapbooks were vainglorious, a necessary striving for community but at an early age and long before I had developed any sense of, well, competency with a poem.  I’ve just had my first book published, and it feels wonderful and humbling all at once. I am apparently a slow learner, and it has taken me many years and with wonderful mentorship to learn anything about writing a poem.  Having the book published makes me feel more solid, if that makes any sense, like a tiny increase in density.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My grade 10 English teacher, Mr. Sceviour, introduced us to William Carlos Williams.  When I read The Red Wheelbarrow, a little door blew open in my head.  It’s hard to explain, but something happened. I wanted to be a writer from a very early age, but I discovered poetry in high school through Carlos Williams.

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?
First drafts come, usually quickly.  Often, if I do not finish a poem on the first pass I will never finish it, as if once I have left the space of origins the garden is sealed.  I am teaching myself to write more considered work, to write through ideas, but it still feels like a chore.  Intellectual poetry often bores me, and yet so much of my being roots around in cerebral places. I haven’t resolved this tension.  A feeling, a place, memory & desire are usually what move me through a poem.  I am a ferocious rewriter.  I drove Cormorant's poetry editor – and friend - Robyn Sarah, to near fury because, as a habit, I so rarely actually finish a poem to the point where I don’t want to adjust in some way.  I almost always want to tinker.  Was it Yeats who said when the poem is finished you hear a “click” as if the lid on a wood box was closed?  I’m always listening for the “click”, but I don’t hear it so often; this is probably something I will get better at.

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?
I have only published the one book, and these poems came out of my life over a period of years.  I like writing that way, and I like reading poems that emerge out of poet’s lives.  Again, I’m working on thinking my way into and out of poetic spaces, but for now it is work and exercise, very little pleasure.  Poems usually emerge (for me) from tension and place; and over the course of the sometimes years that I am working on a poem, they will also attract/navigate/encounter memory, discovery, creation.  And I get to live inside of them and enjoy the private pleasures of playing in the languages that I create for making sense of my life experiences. It’s quite wonderful, really.  I have some ideas for “books”, which I guess means themes to explore poetically, but they remain ideas.  It is hard to escape artificiality of emotion in thematic work, I think.  At least it seems hard.  Ondaatje is one of the rare exceptions – Billy the Kid … a remarkable collection.  I’m trying to think of others …

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I used to read on stages quite a bit, years ago in Vancouver in the 1990s, at the Glass Slipper, the Silvertone, The Grind, Slaughterhouse 5, The Vancouver Press Club. I was part of an informal poets performance group, The Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition, with Rodney DeCroo and others.  We performed in colleges, at the Firehall Theatre … These were years before I was publishing and the live performances provided access to an audience.  Poetry is not a private event, although much of its creation may demand solitude.  It is ultimately a reaching out with desire to create meaning that can be shared.  My interest in poetry shifted away from performance to more private pleasures with language and the page.  And this is for the most part how I enjoy poetry myself, in a book, in privacy.  Although – having said that, I did see Philip Levine read recently in Ottawa, which was wonderful -- such a large warm personality.  But I was already in love with his work.  Readings make more sense to me now - both as a writer and as audience - when the audience knows the poet or the work. It's the same with music: I almost never see a performer whose music I don't already like, unless its at a festival or something.  I am always to be invited to read, live audiences are always thrilling in a way.  But I do think readings are generally more enjoyable when audiences know (and like) the work. 

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?
A critical question in my academic life is the relationship between aesthetics and truth.  Of course, “aesthetics” is a tricky term.  My research at the moment is reconsidering Kant’s critique of judgment in terms of epistemological legitimacy – the role of aesthetics in knowledge, which, surprisingly, is still a little controversial, or it can be depending on your audience.  Journalism has long claimed a monopoly on the aesthetics of truth that I think is being eroded in part by contemporary, online cultural engagement – by publics capable of defining, or at least exploring, their own terms of legitimacy as audiences and producers.  Poetry manifests as a centre of gravity for me no doubt in part because of the complications of “truth” that interest me, the relationship between truth and language, and the limitations of reason.  Sometimes I think that my interest in poetry is all about defending a six year old’s belief in magic, and maybe it is, but there is something urgent at play in the philosophical doubts about modernism, positivity, rational enlightenment.  Aesthetics I think offers a way for us to encounter and resist the ways legitimacies of knowledge reflect relationships of domination.  I'm slipping into dissertation speak, here  – blah – but my point is that aesthetics is one of the ways we can resist whatever limitations might be lurking in cultural assumptions, discourse, ideology, etc.  It is exactly in its beautiful, leaping, confounding, rhythmic, metaphorical forms that poetry – like all art – can allow new ways of being human to flourish.  We exist through our languages, through our symbolic systems; we become through language, and this is the exciting part of living inside poems, like living inside god, or living inside the sun.  Something like that … 

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?
Writers make their way with written language -- I’m not sure I would want to impose one role on all the diverse ways people do this.   Writing informs almost all aspects of culture – advertising, journalism, cinema, research, entertainment -- few modes of expression do not have some kind of relationship with language.  I do respect deeply writers who either wield their craft or use their celebrity to engage with dangerous people and dangerous institutions and who question the legitimacies on which structures of power depend for their sustenance.  Artists everywhere continue to pay the price for making dangerous people uncomfortable – censorship, incarceration, harassment, and death.  The role I aspire to as a writer is to encourage imagination and self-determination.

 8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I genuinely enjoy working with editors – I appreciate outside eyes and sensibilities.  But of course it is essential to be working with an editor who loves your work.  And it is also important to understand how different editors can influence poems differently.  One editor might draw out in every case the grounded resonance of a poem, another might be more interested in the mysteries at work in a poem.  Auden said it well in the idea that what a poet has to offer in terms of criticism is how to write poems like they do: each editor has a sensibility they prefer, will be drawn to, and that they will try to draw from the work  --  

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When in doubt, delete delete delete.  It was advice given to ... I'm not going to remember the name and I can't find it just at the moment, in a published interview with Adrienne Rich or Anne Sexton ...?  And they said in the interview they had been given this advice by yet another admired poet.  Remarkable advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism)? What do you see as the appeal?
This is a really important question, although I don't see it as a “moving between”.  Genre are like rules for understanding – like rules for a game, a “language game” as Wittgenstein says. They set up terms of engagement.  We engage with a scientific report, as reader or writer, differently than a theatrical script, different than a news report, and so on.  But these boundaries between terms of engagement are not neutral any more than any other kind of knowledge is neutral.  One of my academic interests is in the ways journalism defines itself, how so-called professional standards of journalism in fact reflect particular social orientations.  So for example, an interest in objective news reporting, in part, is designed to obscure certain kinds of epistemic short-comings, certain kinds of ambiguities: that language meanings emerge from within and also create relationships, for one; that meanings are inextricably linked to our own integrities, for another; and that a bird's eye view of the world actually reflects an institutional perspective, rather than a human one; etc.  The sustenance of the genre of journalism as we have come to know it (largely in the form it took in the early 20th century) depends in part on maintaining clear distinctions between fact and fiction.  But this is a distinction that grows ever more murky the more closely we examine what language actually does.  My point is that in the maintenance of genres there can be some important political work going on – in the case of journalism, there are all kinds of experiences that through traditional standards of verification are silenced and excluded. There is much interesting cultural work being done currently exploring where one genre boundary bleeds into the next – prose/poetry, fact/fiction, news/entertainment, theatre/journalism, festival/social work, etc. 

I suppose the most significant genre tension for me at the moment is between academic writing and poetry, which are like oil and water for me, at least for now.  I would like to bring these ways of language closer together, and there are some very talented writers and thinkers who do this (Foucault is a beautiful writer; some writings by Barthes and Deleuze make more sense as poetry than scholarly tract; the essays of Pound, short stories of Borges ...).  For the moment, I find the competing demands of the academic/poetic genres – or is it my interest in them? -- somewhat irreconcilable. On the other hand, I have been actively exploring the cross-breeding potentials of poetic forms with journalism -- and O how we need more poetic sensibilities in our news reporting ...

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?

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read – I am so easily inspired by other poets.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Which home?  I've had so many – the smell of lakeshore and pine brings me to my family cottage in Muskoka; the smell of certain kinds of baked goods reminds me of a rooming house I lived in above a bakery in East Vancouver; the smell of Lilacs reminds me of a very old house I lived in, also in East Van, the original farmhouse in the area, apparently; a falling down house filled with spiders and moths, a tiny cement backyard, a home of eccentricity, three cats and a dog, a place where great love flourished for a while, and also later a place of great unhappiness; that's what I think about when I smell lilacs.

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 love visual art and sculpture – nothing has inspired me of late so much as the permanent exhibition of contemporary Inuit art at the NAG in Ottawa.  (It's in the basement, for some reason.)  I really envy the immediately appreciable beauty visual artists can make ... to see something new.  I get quite excited in art galleries sometimes.   When I left the Inuit exhibition, I was so excited and disoriented I thought my car had been stolen.  I searched and searched, reported it to the police, reported it to my insurance company, and then some hours later found it where I had parked it.  The exhibition was that good!  

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lately I have been reading a lot of Louis Borges. I don't always understand what exactly is going on, but I like what happens inside my head when I read him ...

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
There are so so many things that I haven't done ... work as a speech writer, for one.  I have also been thinking about long-form fiction.  And I would love to be a foreign correspondent for a time . There are many many more ... 

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?
Being a writer can mean being so many things ...most of the things I have done, I have done through my writing: journalist, activist, policy advocate, administrator, paralegal, academic ... This is more of a preference than a default, but I think I would have loved a life in the theatre – on stage, directing; it is still to my mind one of the most exciting arts to participate in. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Nothing made me write, but I have wanted to write for as long as I can remember.  I have tried many things – directing theatre, video art, music (I played piano and saxophone when I was young), drawing, documentary – and it is writing I must always do.  I don't really know why ...

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book that I read (fiction) was The Master and the Margarita (Bulgakov), wonderful tale, creepy and wonderful. The last great film was – wait, does The Wire count?  I have been enjoying the long-form narratives of television more than film these days – The Wire, Treme, Deadwood, The Hour ... As for films, I loved Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau), such a beautiful film that reminds how powerful cinema can be telling stories of human pain and catharsis without all the pizazz of political intrigue, crime, etc. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I have a cycle of poems I am working through related to my recent move to Chelsea, Quebec, a vast forested suburb in the Gatineau Hills. I thought I would love living in the country, but I don't, really.  I miss my friends, I miss the cafes and bars of Montreal, I miss the ready-at-hand culture of the big city, the crowds and energy and constant motion.  I miss the sense of being part of something, of being plugged into a cultural, political electricity.  It's great for getting work done, and I'm writing my dissertation, so that's all well and good.  But it is a hard fit. It is making me sensitive to where the border blurs between civilization and wilderness because where I live is neither city nor country, and both stand out in starker contrast – the roots slowly slowly tearing into the foundation of the house, the infuriating stoicness of trees, car dependence, oil tanks to fill at the side of the house, delicious well water, bears in the compost, clean clean air, no public space to share, and on and on. And, as I said, I have been thinking a little about fiction ...

[Michael Lithgow reads in Ottawa as part of The Plan 99 Reading Series with Donald McGrath at 5pm Saturday, September 29, 2012]

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

ottawater #9: call for submissions,

Currently seeking submissions to the ninth issue of the Ottawa poetry annual pdf journal, ottawater, from current and former Ottawa residents ONLY (although if you were in issue #8, you have to wait another year to submit again). Send poem or poems as single .doc with bio ("ottawater" in subject line) to rob_mclennan@hotmail.com by September 29, 2012. Query for interviews, reviews and/or critical essays.

my profile of The TREE Reading Series, Ottawa is now up at open book: ontario

My profile of Rod Pederson and The TREE Reading Series, an Ottawa institution since 1980, is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

Gerry Gilbert, COUNTERFEIT PENNIES

There most likely aren’t too many titles by the late Vancouver poet and publisher Gerry Gilbert (April 7, 1936 – June 19, 2009) in print anymore, with the exception possibly of the chapbook PERHAPS (Toronto ON: BookThug, 1999) and the reissued Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004), but the enthusiasm for his work appears to have steadily increased over the past few years. Since Gilbert died, a tribute blog appeared, with regular updates, and there are more references to him online that one might think, for an author who barely published through trade form over his last two decades. Now, thanks to Vancouver poets Lary Bremner (publisher of Obvious Epiphanies Press), Carol and Jamie Reid, who went through Gilbert’s archive, we now have access to his COUNTERFEIT PENNIES (North Vancouver BC: obvious epiphanies press, 2012) as a free pdf download.

During the early 60’s in Vancouver, Gerry Gilbert was part of an informal grouping of “downtown Vancouver poets” with John Newlove, Judith Copithorne, Maxine Gadd and Roy Kiyooka, less a group than a ying to the yang of TISH. With a healthy distrust of editors and (seemingly) publisher, Gilbert’s expansive ouvre appeared in trade form with great effort, as he infamously refused to have his work edited. He even turned down the opportunity to be in a series of selected poems that Talonbooks produced around 1980 (others in the series included bpNichol, Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah). As Frank Davey wrote about Gilbert in From There to Here (Erin ON: Press Porcepic, 1974):

Gilbert’s experimental world is that of most men alive in these decades, mundane, trivial, thoroughly non-spectacular – enriched only by the easily missed miracles of animals, plants, the weather, or intimate human gesture. He presents this world in the way in which it impinges on him: a puzzingly discontinuous flow of broken images. “AND”, the title of one of his books, is the usual Gilbert conjunction, since it implies no logical structure or relationship. To Gilbert, experience is endless non sequitur.

As Davey suggests, Gilbert’s writing was an endless, singular line of ephemera, miracles and “intimate human gesture,” documenting the entirety of what he saw, felt and did, taking the Frank O’Hara “I did this, I did that” poem to its extreme. Dated 1996 to 1997, Gilbert’s COUNTERFEIT PENNIES is wonderfully reproduced exactly the way the author intended, scanning directly from the mass of binders that filled his small apartment. There is the strangest kind of detail in Gilbert’s work, knowing that his work was composed of a single, straight, life-long line, one that readers only saw in the comparatively briefest parcels.

            The way he said it to me, that I didn’t remember but we’d met years ago, put me on the defensive right away, smelling trouble. He got my number alright. I’m so beat I can barely play along enough to read the paper; or want what I really want; or really want what I want. As my voice gets fainter, I pile on the wisdom; bore ; ing. If you know what this means, you must have read it already.

There aren’t many copies of Gerry Gilbert works available out in the world anymore, but I’m sure if you want to read further of his works, I’d recommend jwcurry’s Room 302 Books in Ottawa as the best place to begin.

12 or 20 (second series) with Bin Ramke

Bin Ramke’s books include AERIAL (Omnidawn, 2012), TENDRIL (Omnidawn, 2007),  MATTER (U of Iowa Press,  2004), AIRS, WATERS, PLACES (U of Iowa Press, 2001), and WAKE (U of Iowa Press, 1999). THEORY OF MIND: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS appeared from Omnidawn in 2009. Since 1984 he has taught at the University of Denver where he holds the Phipps Chair in English and is an Evans Professor, and where he edited the Denver Quarterly for seventeen years. He edited some eighty books of poems for the University of Georgia Press; he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1979. He lives with Linda Ramke and their son, Nicolas, and a schnoodle, Ollie.

“Much of my youth was spent in the bayous and marshes of the Texas-Louisiana border among many Cajun and German-immigrant relatives. When I moved to Colorado a quarter-century ago it was partly because of a need to move out of the south, but the effect of distance caused me to see regions and regionalisms as intense, energizing, agonizing necessities. Geography, geology, and the histories accrued by the residents, human and otherwise, are what poetry attempts to come to terms with, to provide terms (words and chronologies) for. Even though I never think of myself as writing ‘about’ either the festering humidity of the one region, or the desiccating aridity of the other, the phrases and intonations of the people who breathe those airs and who turn landscape into properties of region, they insist on asserting themselves.”

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
What changes the first book caused were gradual—I was teaching at a small college in south Georgia when Yale Press took the book, and I continued in that same place, teaching freshman composition five days a week, for another six years (I got a raise, though). The main change was a relief from the pressure I had felt to publish, to get work into print. Then the pressure I felt was to write a book which would make up for the failings of the previous.

My more recent work differs quite a lot from my earliest attempts, in my mind. I sort of lump the first four books into an experiment in autobiographical-geographical exploratory gesturing, some of it of some aesthetic interest, some less so. But with a volume called The Erotic Light of Gardens I began unhooking language from “experience” in a more interesting (to me) manner, and allowing the poem to be the place where I did the thinking and the ersatz-living. I stopped trying to be a reporter. But then two books later, in Wake, I think for the first time I allowed the poems to reflect how I thought (rather than present what I hoped others would think were interesting thoughts).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to it out of mathematics—I was a mathematics major in college when I first began reading poetry. I was particularly intrigued by Wallace Stevens, intrigued by the range of things made out of words. But in fact my earliest attempts at poems were really imitations of Hart Crane, whom I was also studying at the time. I never thought I could write stories, and was never ambitious to write the Truth, that is, non-fiction. Looking back at it from across the decades, I suppose I did have some sense of poetry as the same sort of manipulation of symbols as mathematics was, but one I could do more readily, and more accurately.

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?
I suppose starting takes no time at all, but then becomes a slow sort of development. I am going to combine questions here and note that for the past several books I have tended to have projects develop by writing short poems that I either combine into longer ones, or that begin a trajectory I follow for months or years. For instance, these days I am thinking about a number of people—Alan Turing, John Cage, and Edmond Jabès among them—who were born in 1912. Something about this centennial of their births makes me want to understand something of their various makings. But I doubt that the poetry that results from this thinking will actually point in obvious ways at these people themselves. But yes, I will keep taking notes and see where that takes me.

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?
The process usually involves coming up several poems that seem afterward to share some motif or theme or structural similarity, and then I begin consciously following that trajectory—probably after I have accumulated thirty to fifty pages of work. So I work on a book from the middle.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They are somewhat counter to my creative process, and yet I do enjoy doing readings. I do not like my voice and cringe when I hear it in recordings, yet the actual process of reading aloud does give me a kind of pleasure. But I write for the page, and take many of my clues from the look of letters and words on the page, at least as much as from the sounds they make. But the sounds I care about are not the sounds I speak, only the ones I hear when writing.

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?
Those questions are no longer separable by me from the poems, the process of the poems. I am not so much hoping to answer questions as to find connections, follow connections, find where they lead.

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 think a writer—a person who makes things with words—should be aware of how words reveal the culture in small and large ways, and offer a (useful, beautiful, or at least interesting) version of that awareness to others. But I can only think about this in work itself, my own and others’. That is, when I see it happening I believe in a role for the writer, but when I try to separate the concept from the actual work I find myself saying banal truisms.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh certainly, both. The trouble for me is I tend to live with my attempts for a long time and come to see weakness and failure only gradually. To have failure pointed out abruptly is not merely painful but not terribly useful—I seem to need the time passing during which I come to understand my failures. But one doesn’t always have the time.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I am not much aware of advice. I don’t really believe in it. I believe in personal failure, lessons learned.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Not easy, but there are uses for prose, uses for different forms of thinking, and while poetry is by far the most “natural” mode of thought and exposition for me, I want to say those other things. I plan to attempt several essays very soon….but I do not expect it to be easy.

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 write fragments, notes, phrases and words nearly constantly, certainly on average a page or more per day in a journal. And I suppose four or five times per week I type things, either reworking of material I have been working on or transcriptions from that note-taking. But none of this is planned or at a particular time of day. I like having coffee in the morning and taking notes from my current reading, and then returning to those beginnings at odd intervals throughout the day. But most useful writing gets done in the morning.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I read for that breathing in of language and idea, and I read for solace and because books surround me. But writing doesn’t much get stalled for me any more—it is just what I do, whether I do it well or badly.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Jasmine, gardenia—both plants which grew in my own yard and on the property of every relative I visited. And the smells of various cookings—browning of roux, for instance.

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?
Yes to all of that—and mathematics in particular. I cannot do it, but I can read it. In fact I am deliberately moving away from a poetics arising directly from other poems. I read science and mathematics (preferably not popularizations but the sort of direct source stuff, see for instance arXiv. org, that I do not much understand but still find beautiful.)

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lucretius (a kind of perfect writer to me); Beckett; various scriptures, Christian and otherwise. Barry Mazur’s website. The various writings of my students, current and former—this is a truth I came to realize only recently, how much they have influenced me over the years.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
An excellent question to which I have no answer, because there is so little I have done.

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 suppose my “occupation” in the sense you mean is teacher—it is what I get paid to be. I fell into that, and it is what allowed me to do the writing. I simply cannot imagine myself doing anything else, although I would probably have done whatever was necessary.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When my older brother was taking photography lessons from a certain retired Naval officer I wanted to be included. My parents told me he had his talent and mine was different, it was writing. I didn’t believe them, but I obeyed. Later I tried various visual arts, mathematics, etc. but I suppose the only thing I found consistent encouragement in was poetry.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last “great book”—The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch. I suppose it is great in every sense of that word. The last great film was probably La Jetee, which I watched for the fifteenth or sixteenth time…

20 - What are you currently working on?
A group of poems, around thirty pages so far, with the title “The Inconceivable.” It includes those meditations on Turing, Cage, and Jabes, as well as other work arising from considerations of “the art of numbering and measuring exactly a thing whose existence cannot be conceived.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

I've been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize!

For the first time, I've been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, for a selection of poems from the manuscript-in-progress, "household items." I'm in good company, too, alongside thirty-five others, including Stephanie Bolster, Sandy Pool (twice!), Bren Simmers, Deanna Young (twice!) and Alison Calder. Apparently the shortlist is announced on September 17, and the winner a week later. Wouldn't that be the finest wedding present ever?

Ongoing notes: early September, 2012

Where does all the time go? I’ve been saying this for years, it seems. Currently, we’re on the final of six days (again) in Sainte-Adele, Quebec, hiding out in Christine’s mother’s cottage, quietly working on various projects, just we and our wee cat, Lemonade. Sainte-Adele, where we witnessed the blue moon, what Peyo claimed brought about the birth of another new Smurf (we so far have seen none).

Mere weeks to the wedding, now. Check out the“engagement photo” that Ottawa artist Tom Fowler did for us, recently posted to the wedding blog. Fantastic!

I just had a chapbook manuscript accepted by Gaspereau Press! Watch for spring 2013 for the appearance of Mother Firth’s, a poem I wrote on old Bytown history, my finally own Devil’s Whim…

Vancouver BC: After I complained in the previous “Ongoing notes” about receiving so few Canadian-made chapbooks by Canadian writers, it was a relief to see Vancouver poet and interview Kevin Spenst’s self-published Happy Hollow & the Surrey Suite (2012). As he writes in the colophon:

This chap-book bricolage was finished August 2012 at the Sage Hill Writing Experience: the energy in these poems was siphoned from my fellow writers. Special thanks is due to my workshop instructor Ken Babstock and fellow poets Margot Lettner, Cassidy McFadzean, Ruth Asher, Jacob Scheier, & Brian Campbell. Thank you for helping me get the right mix.

I’ve always liked small workshop chapbooks such as these, and/or works produced when the writer is on any kind of away-trip, whether retreat, vacation or whatever else. The chapbook even reminds me of when I used to receive envelopes of chapbooks from Robert Kroetsch moons ago, works by himself and various students during a previous Sage Hill Experience. It was where I was long ago introduced to the work of K.I. Press, I believe.

In Spenst’s chapbook, the poems run the gamut, and a number work in the immediate “I did this, I did that” mode, with poems for “Lumsden,” “Qu’appelle Valley,” “St. Michael’s Retreat” and “SaskEnergy,” using the material at hand to trigger poems. Still, the poems here that resonate most are the ones that exist beyond these pieces, with all the action sometimes taking over, distracting from what might really be going on; once the material of the immediate has been utilized does the writing happen, where the deepest action occurs.

Uncle Willy’s Buffet

believe it or not was once the stomping grounds of the only Canadian sumo wrestler who’d thrown in the mawashi and come back from Japan never acclimatized to wiping the derrieres of senior sumos but instead ended up at Hans and Willy’s establishment where they charged him for two and he ate like three sittings at Surrey’s very own Mount Fuji in the middle of the restaurant next to Craig and his skater-buddies from Cloverdale with their backpacks stuffed with chicken breasts when no one was looking and around the corner from them was the girl with the “what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at” hair lip and her “well-don’t-fuckin’-look-at-me-I-gotta-deal-with-her-all-the-time” boyfriend and then through the swinging doors was the dish-pit drop and then the closet with the two-liter of sweet cooler which we took turns chugging and then through the thump-thump doors again, looking at Surrey’s Mount Fuji who was in fact smaller than the glass pyramid atop Guildford Mall, but bigger than the cloth I’d used to wipe my first table under the tutelage of Hans who’d just come from East Germany to start a business with Willy who was from West Germany and who liked my Germanic looks enough to forgive my first wipe of crumbs from the table directly onto the floor and next to them was the manager with hair like Roger Daltry who sold coke on the side and my friend Sigsworth who started a month after me and was always coming down from acid and there I was with my free plate of buffet at the end of the day and all the ice-cream I could stomach.

Davis CA: Every time I think the slew of dusie chapbooks that once flooded my mailbox are over, another one slips its way through, this time equinox (2011) by California poet and publisher Jill Stengel. Equinox, as the title suggests, was “written on the autumnal equinox, 2011 / inconsistencies included with intention.” As she writes:

dear equinox—what will you

bring me—or, rather, what will

I make of you—enough with

the waiting—I move ahead

outward onward into—passive

chalice ruptured

This is a lovely, short sequence: “I am out here raw as the / night sky waiting for you”

New Orleans LA: From New Orleans poet and 17 Poets organizer Megan Burns comes the chapbook a city / bottle boned (Chicago Il: dancing girl press, 2012), a short sequence of etchings on her home town, scratched in small phrases across the white page. As her thirteen-part/page poem begins:

[in the anatomy]

here             rivulet of sweat pathing

a maze of goosebumps

    night flesh

listen to the thunder      deep in no rain

think about a wind that bends bodies

picks up bones       discard:

      rush of featherless flight

      rumor of pretty birds

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Broadbent

Laura Broadbent was born in Stratford Ontario and has lived in Montreal for the past seven years. She won the most recent Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and her poetry collection OH THERE YOU ARE, I CAN'T SEE YOU, IS IT RAINING? is out momentarily from Snare Books.

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 is forthcoming with Snare Books in the Fall of 2012.  The story is this: I had just completed my [creative writing] master’s thesis and knew about the Kroetsch Award, so I thought: Why Not. I’ve been notoriously reticent about showing my work until I believe I have written something approaching my impossible standards. The manuscript I sent for the Kroetsch award was the first poetry I have ever sent out in the world. By some miracle the world took care of it. Being shortlisted alone was enough. It meant, simply and profoundly: Laura you have permission to write. Or, in less sentimental terms, it meant: It Isn’t Total Shit. Which was the best gift possible. The resulting kindness, congratulations and encouragement from my peers is overwhelming. Further permission. I realize pretty much everyone believed in me except me. That’s the story.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry last. In fact I hated poetry for a long time – I thought I didn’t understand it. I thought it was phony, pretentious, and intentionally obfuscatory.  Like becoming best friends with someone you initially thought was an impossible jerk. I was taking fiction classes, and the comments were always the same: the language is rich, the images are precise, the ideas are good, but there is no narrative. I don’t believe that fiction needs narrative, but whatever. That’s when I realized I was a poet. I wrote my first poem in 2008. My first poetry professor was the Canadian Poet Laureate at the time, John Steffler. All at once it dawned on me that not only was I a poet, but I have always been a poet. I’m pretty sure one is born that way. I think and observe and live like a poet. I’ve always had an immense staring problem.

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?
I make a mess and then see what I can do with it. Same goes for ‘life in general.’ Ideas for any of my better poems always come as a direct flash of inspiration. Some call it the voice of the Muse. Sometimes, very rarely, they come out fully formed and all I have to do is make minor adjustments. But usually I psychically projectile-vomit way too much onto the page, and then strategically take away, lug away, take away. I suffer from excess in general. Too intense. Too passionate. Enormous emotions. I’m always too much, and my initial writing is no different. So, with this excess, after I’ve taken most of it out, I then take a break from the page, clear my mind. Then I take out my editorial surgical instruments and refine it to the most crystalline form I can. I have to be ruthless and trust the intelligence of my readers. I haven’t mastered this whatsoever. It’s arduous and I love it. It hurts so good. I wish I could refine my person the way I do my writing. However, and this is important, I craft the fuck out of my poems but I don’t want them to seem too cool and ‘crafted,’ I still want them to contain human mess, monstrosity, and warmth. A fine line.

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?
I don’t begin with images, I begin with abstract ideas or theoretical concepts. The image is created to flesh the central conceit. Sometimes there are no images. Sometimes someone just says something outrageous and that’s it. Thinking of a book is far too overwhelming. I work in suites and series, and usually there is a conceptual or narrative thread that makes these individual suites work together, and they create a dialogue. This aleatory coherence makes the world feel magic.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I hate readings. I attend for moral support for friends or colleagues, but I hate to read my work. I never wanted a public persona, I’m exceedingly private, I always wanted my work to stand on its own. A tall order. I am this utterly confusing and confused mix of extrovert and introvert. When I speak to people I think it seems effortless, at least confident, yet I hate being looked at and I crave long stretches of deep solitude. I need to drink a lot around crowds. My nervous system is shot. I can’t lie very well and performance is basically the joy of lying, and I don’t mean that in the pejorative whatsoever. It is acting. In my classes I was always the only one who was against reading, so I’m led to believe there is something wrong with me about this. I just have such a romance with the idea of the intimacy of reading in solitude, how my words can change every time, with every reader. I’m an awkward lonely person and I write, in a way, for awkward lonely people. I don’t want the fact that I am a reasonable looking young woman be why anybody would be  interested in my poetry. Or me for that matter.

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?
Yes absolutely. Poetry is thinking made visible. Not only thinking made visible, but organizing and presenting thought in such a way that the reader takes on the flavour and momentum of thought and wants to go off and write for his or herself because of it. The intersection between poetry and philosophy is not talked about enough. Jan Zwicky does a good job of it. Anne Carson too. Majorly so. I’m constantly taking on philosophical ideas and thinking them through lyrically, conceptually, or straight-up solipsistically. I love to think excessively and heavily and poetry allows me to think through things in my own weird way. And nerdy too, since I derive such pleasure out of it. The current questions are far too heavy and too many to write here. You’ll have to read my subsequent books. The world breaks my heart in the best and worst ways. I’m worried.

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?
This sounds dramatic, yet it is a fact: the writing of others has saved my life. On a less dramatic level, the writing of others enriches my life every single day. Writing has frightening exciting power. Basically you either are a writer or you aren’t, and you either do something about it, or you don’t. Writers certainly aren’t respected like they used to be. The currency of the soul used to be far more important. But I like that writers, poets in particular, aren’t obliged to be writing about the soul all the time either. This business about the soul is still a general misconception about poetry though [like my father thinks all poets are prophets]. Not everyone is Rumi or Mary Oliver. The creative possibilities available to a poet are truly exciting. You can be a prophet, a mystic, a humorist, a [post]modernist, a romantic, a dada-ist, an intellectual, a conceptualist, a minimalist, a sentimentalist [but please don’t be], [etc], or a combination of all of them. Yet the lack of a coherent poetic ‘norm,’ or big ‘movement,’ also means a diffused audience. I’m more or less happy for that. Unfortunately, in larger culture, ‘being a writer’ means being a journalist, a script writer, or one of the 0.001 percent of novelists and 0.000000000001 percent of poets who can live off their work. However I’m glad to see how much great poetry is constantly being made – when you’re a poet you simply can’t help it. Because we’re a minority, we support each other. I bet 96% of poetry books bought are bought by poets. I really want our culture to care more about poetry. It’s why I want to teach. Yet. And yet. Really good journalism is poetry to me. A well written script is poetry. A masterful sandwich is pure poetry. The poets are at work, just with different job titles, really. My dad’s a poet/prophet disguised as a postman.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. Writers write in the dark. I have very low self confidence and I simply need someone I respect to tell me what I’ve done. I fear the day, actually, when I just assume what I’ve done is good. I become blind to my work, I’m not sure what it is, I just know I did it. A good editor’s suggestions are always pretty simple but seem revolutionary, because they solve this problem you’ve been obsessed with and unable to solve, with a single stroke. It’s one of my favourite things, like, ‘Laura cut this last line,’ and I’m staggered by the genius of the suggestion. ‘Kill your babies’ is an old writing maxim, and it is true. Kill your babies, otherwise your editor will. When somebody offers you good editing feedback, you want to kiss their feet. So if there are any foot fetishist editors out there...

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
‘Chill Out, Broadbent’ – Everyone

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?
There is an enormous appeal for me. Genres are borders meant to be moved, as far as I am concerned. I am interested in illustration and design, and I want to oversee the creation of my future books so that the form is absolutely part of the content. My aesthetic sensibilities are somewhat appeased by poetry as I have to pay attention to the actual physicality and space of the page more, that is, the space is part of the poem, or the form the words take on the page can perform themselves, like Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. I am crazy about Kenneth Patchen’s painting poems. Derek Beaulieu is a different story altogether. Robert Bringhurst is nuts about typography and layout. William Blake. Illuminated manuscripts. It’s been going on since forever and current artists/writers are doing really neat stuff constantly. These intermedial artists have been deemed the ‘blur generation.’ Gets me really excited. Beautiful books, or deconstructed books, or book boxes, odd or well-crafted signs, or paintings with text, such things make me drool. I should care more about the internet, and the great/terrible things it has provided for writers. But I'm old school and I love the tactility of objects, the smell of paper. The smell of paper for me is like the smell of women's panties for a dirty old man.

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 need to write daily. I don’t. It is my biggest frustration. I can’t figure out how to do it, this thing they call ‘discipline.’ Morning writing is productive, night writing is slowly poured. I can’t even choose a time of day. Honestly, if I spent the time writing that I do dying over my love life, I’d have 40 books of poetry written by now.  I also work three jobs.  People advise me to marry rich because then I could sit around, look pretty, and write all I want. Or write on our yacht. No idea disgusts me more, unfortunately.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Anne Carson is my version of an anti-anxiety pill. She orders things for me. She makes my brain burn to write. I return to her most frequently. Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ is something I’ve read forty times at least. People call her the philosopher of heartbreak. Fernando Pessoa and Clarice Lispector are close seconds. I like to read haiku or Vera Pavlova for example to remember economy. Lydia Davis always inspires and cheers me up – obviously, she’s good for  economy too. I like to read a lot of mystical stuff too – along the lines of Taoism and Buddhism and Jewish Mysticism, and then follow them with these great Western Canon Curmudgeons like Schopenhauer or Seneca. Theorists like Deleuze, Bataille, Bergson, Cixous, really get me going. Simon Weil ignites me and makes me feel guilt for not being hardcore enough. There’s a too-wide spectrum.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Garlic bread. We were poor and ate spaghetti maybe four days a week. Or maybe Christmas trees.

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?
That’s nuts. I know what he’s saying, but it just obviously sounds insane. Everything influences my work. And everyone. You have to watch life, indeed, stare at it, have a really big staring problem, to write. You’ve got to dive in, which is why I make a bad Buddhist – suffering is really good for writing. I willingly take on pain, I'm not that scared of it, I find it interesting and rewarding. Destruction and rebirth. I’m way too curious. It’s impossible to figure people out, and so fun. It’s hard to figure a bird out, and so fun. It’s hard to figure a memory out, and so fun. What is wine all about? A whole lot.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ll spare you. I am a true book-slut, I work in a bookstore, and my list is unreasonably long. Reading is my life. My apartment is stuffed with books.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Have enough cash to buy my beautiful mother a house [my ability to hope borders on insanity]. Also, I’d like to calm down and be nicer to myself. I haven’t done that yet. Maybe I'd like to be a mother be the state of the world terrifies me.

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 drummer. [Obviously not concerned with being rich.] I would also like to be a dolphin or a sloth. I’d like to be a body of water, like Lake Huron.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I started dictating stories to my mother before I could write. So I began around 2-3 years old. Or I would draw a picture, and tell her the story of it. I just couldn’t not. I still can’t not. I was homeschooled for a bit, but when I started ‘real school’ I was socially inept but made my way by being the default ‘class artist’ or ‘class writer.’ Like, ‘ask Laura to write/draw that for you.’

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Ariana Reines has been blowing my mind. She is this power-mix of magic [something poetry doesn’t have enough of these days] and intellect [something poetry has too much of these days], grit and grace, craft and mess, courage and vulnerability….read her. She’s got compelling audacity and really big brains.

The Turin Horse is the last movie that really did a number on me for weeks. It was so unbearable, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how great it was after. The understanding came after. Absolutely haunting. Barely any words in it. Less than ten words, I bet. A film that felt like 40 hours. Don’t know how long it was in actuality. Brutal art.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Three things four the next four months: 1. Finish my degree. 2. I’m having an art show in the fall so I need to get painting. 3. Begin writing my next collection of poems [also: 4. Read voraciously. 5. Better myself. 6. Be more social. Oh and 7. Make money.]



March 2012

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Matthew Hall reviews A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks) in Canadian Literature

Matthew Hall was good enough to review A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011) in Canadian Literature, alongside recent titles by Stan Rogal and Erin Moure (see the full review here). Thanks, Matthew Hall! Thanks, Canadian Literature!

"I burn at both ends" seems a telling understatement from mclennan’s latest book, A (short) history of l, a series of love poems based on the ghazal. mclennan’s investigation into the history of love and the capacity of the individual to sustain and grow through love’s negotiations and trials is uniquely tied to the lyric. Early on, he underscores the enquiry of the book:

    I am interested in how lyricism
    bonds itself to our molecules.
    the insistence of light against
    insistence of dark.

mclennan’s poems work to explore the particularity of the moments in which the other becomes a part of oneself. "dictionary of touch" is one of the most profoundly lyrical and cadenced works in the collection, with an estranged sense of the capacity of love to open expansively to the meaning of small gestures. Through this poem, the idea of reciprocity and mutual understanding is incited:

    … we are shades
    of meaning, shadowing
    the other. the dictionary
    useless, for what
    we have figured out. what
    we already know.

The disparity between what we have learned and what we have to learn is part of the processional core of mclennan’s new book, an avid exploration of the materials, the moments, the changes we undergo through love. mclennan’s style courses through the collection; the thematic energy which he devotes to his poetic is exceedingly renewing. The poems are referential, meditative spaces in which the history of love is imagined through literary antecedents, subjective presences, and technological complexes, and pits mclennan’s love as testament to his development, as personal and poetic.

August's TRUCK; a month of poems,

In case you didn't notice, that nice Halvard Johnson was good enough to let me drive his TRUCK for the month of August, and i posted a month's worth of poems by various Canadian writers: nikki reimer, Stan Rogal, Camille Martin, Monty Reid, Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Amanda Earl, Kathryn MacLeod, Marcus McCann, Sandra Ridley, Cameron Anstee, Daphne Marlatt, Gil McElroy, Natalee Caple, Nathan Dueck, Priscila Uppal, Lary Bremner, Marilyn Irwin, Jay MillAr, Sonnet L'Abbé, Jordan Abel, Trisia Eddy, Joe Blades, Meghan Jackson, Barry McKinnon, Judith Copithorne, Rob Budde, Shannon Bramer, David McGimpsey, Kim Minkus and George Bowering, finally ending the month with a new piece of mine. Check out the entire month here.