I’m intrigued by this new first poetry collection, Susan Briscoe, The Crow’s Vow (Montreal QC: Véhicule Press / Signal, 2010), a book-length sequence of (although not named) seeming-ghazals. There are some lovely moments throughout the collection, with short poems one-per-page that run through the tension between abstract and an ongoing narrative around seasons, birds and the narrator wife/mother, with poems that pull sometimes more one way than another. The poems that seem strongest, perhaps, are the ones that fall more on the abstract side. This is an intriguing long poem, long sequence, one that didn’t strike fully, but struck in a more occasional, subtle, way. I am intrigued to see where this poet goes next.
There’s a hole in the yard.
Yesterday I wielded the spade,
dug at it some more. Eyed its depth,
paced its span. Satisfying work.
A robin watched from the swing set.
My boy, now and then, stood by:
there are things he could do with a hole this size.
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 made me realize more than ever that my "career" had to be in writing. That I was a writer. A poet. And, for the first time, I was able to see that certain joys in my life up until then had always been connected to my ability to say things in ways that resonated with friends, family, teachers, examiners, listeners, readers and publishers, at least for the first book. Land Without Chocolate, A Memoir. Maria Jacobs of Wolsak and Wynn in Toronto really loved the MSS and bought Land.
I am writing two books and both have been in creation for almost 10 years now.
The Best Ghosts in The World was conceived right after Land and The Pornography of Harry Persaud came out of Ghosts and some themes I was flirting with at the time without realizing they would mature in my thinking over the years and come to inform where I am now.
They feel more mature and the voices of these books could not have emerged had I not allowed myself to live away from writing for the last 10 years, teaching and traveling.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have never written fiction. Non-fiction, I suppose, if you count the essays, one I wrote on Edgar Mittelholzer, a fascinating Guyanese novelist who needs to be reinvestigated and reread and republished; and the other, on Jean Rhys and, in a way, Roland Barthes.
Poetry was what I always would imagine myself writing and creating. In fact, adopting the pose of the poet in Grade 8 (yes, the romanticization began early!), meant becoming dedicated to as much learning as I could get out of school because everything I gained from books and classes and the adults teaching me-all of it made me excited in my mind.
When I was an undergraduate at Queen's in the late 80s/early 90s, I won my first poetry award. Those poems are still around in some form or the other. A friend of mine in London has a whole bunch and enjoys showing them to me because I don't recognize the voice at all and because I can't find any truth in them other than nervous laughter at the thought that those poems emblematize the actual beginning, the real juvenalia, of my life in poems.
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 stopped trying to write another book after Land was published because, well, I had nothing to say and what I did end up saying, the second book, The Best Ghosts in the World, was inscrutable and had no point of entry (into the text) for readers.
So, that book has gone through several stages and I have enjoyed immensely watching it evolve and almost make itself, depending on where I am living in the world. That book went through several stages not because I am a perfectionist but because I knew that what I had written in 2001 were the "field notes" to myself before doing the work that would make poems out of those "notes."
Once I'm done with the poems that emerge from the initial notes (also poems) then I'd like to submit both versions as one text. Does that make sense?
The second manuscript, The Pornography of Harry Persaud, doesn't have several different versions or drafts. Poems are worked on depending on whether or not I have a raw kind of inspiration for them.
I trust myself to never forget a poem and end up never completing it, never letting it into my inspiration.
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?
That's a good question. I remember Michael Ondaatje saying that The English Patientbegan with just one random image he had in his mind, of a man falling out of a burning plane. I forget where he said that. But he said it. And I loved this talk of origins, for and of the worlds artists bring into being, when they make things.
Land began in Kingston, Jamaica in 1992. I was teaching and living there. I was sitting in my aunt's backyard and listening to New Order on my Walkman. Her flat was right across the street from the Bob Marley Museum. It was the height of identity politics in the UNIs and I felt armed and dangerous. I felt good. I was listening to "Temptation" and the lines, "Oh you've got green eyes, oh, you've got blue eyes, oh you've got reeeeeeeed eyes..." and I started the Mango Psalms. That was it.
Four years later my mother died and the grief was enough to see me finish the MSS.
Ghosts began after watching The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, realizing that in grieving the loss of my mother I was always watching the past in my mind the way I would watch a film and assess it's various parts. Like what I did in London last month when I was watching Shutter Island.
Harry Persaud began in gay bathhouses and saunas.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading publicly. I really believe that all art is for public consumption, even and especially art that might have been made just to keep one person alive or in life or to make sense of life. It has the power to transform you or, if you don't need transforming, to be a correspondent, to engage, dialogically, with the world around you.
But, I don't write with a public audience in mind. Though I love fantasizing about how it would all sound and mean to listeners.
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 (theoretical concerns) tend to be made more aware to me by scholars and readers who have written essays or papers about my poems.
However, I would say that there is a theoretical concern that is quite prominent at the moment in my writing. That would be the issue of homosexuality within and against and through West Indian locations, there and here, and what the spirit world thinks of it all. Are the ancestors also fighting it and fighting us-the queer present-from the realm of the "other" senses? I think a lot about what it might mean to be ruled out of a collective history because of your sexual orientation, to be thought of as unworthy of carrying the lines of family and inheritance into the future as a result of one's two-spiritedness. This is obviously my own version of a ghost story/a horror tale of some kind. Against histories of catastrophe (slavery, plantations, indentureship, civil riots and debt), the whole idea of the family acquires enormous significances. Family can become the monster that preys upon certain freedoms and choices that reflect the right of succeeding generations to go off in search of their own personal histories, as I say in one poem, "outside/the walls/of Dad."
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 don't really know. I could give you all the inspirational, political and social narratives you've heard before as to the defense of poesy or of the writer or of the artist, etc. In society. In community. In education. In culture. In nationalism. In memory. We could go on and on when talking about art and society now and in the past.
I guess I would love to be the kind of poet who, even when talking about really, really personal, small things, like having sex for the first time in 1984 in a suburban basement after a session of Dungeons & Dragons, is still able to reveal the need for beauty in the world, as a force, an energy, even as a weapon to show certain folks how absolutely ridiculous their violences are.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
People want the work to read the way it sounds. I don't know what I do live but something happens with the way the words flow. People have tried to say it's West Indian or Caribbean that way and I suppose it is. Because we do sing English; we feel things in a certain kind of way. God, have you ever read Aime Cesaire? That's what Shelley meant in his Defense. Exactly what Cesaire is revealing in his Cahier. It gave me goosebumps!
Editors leave the work alone usually and let it stay in print the way I've read it or written it down.
Not a lot of my stuff has been workshopped or edited.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"You don't have to write your oeuvre overnight."
Someone said that to me once when I was experiencing stultifying waves of Duende, as Lorca defined and wrote about it. I felt death and it was interfering with my bursts of inspiration rather than facilitating them.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Well, I don't "live" or work as a professional writer all the time. I have supported myself by teaching and through the very wise financial planning of previous generations in my family. What I am saying is that my routines change depending on my personal circumstances.
Today, I woke up at 10:30 am. I made coffee. I ate some oats with blackberries. I walked my dog, Sabrina. I cleaned some brass objects I inherited from my mother, using Brasso, which brings back so many memories of growing up in Georgetown, Guyana. Product names usually open the floodgates, like MILO and Ovaltine and Dettol and Marmite and TUMS and Strepsils. More, of course.
I write at night. Like James Agee and Timothy Findley, nighttime brings supreme creativity for me. The house sleeps. That's when I fire up the archipelagoes of imagination.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
That's a good one. You know, I don't have writer's block. I can always write stuff but if I think it's crap then I just stop writing and do other things. Like teach and earn a paycheck and strap on my backpack, Pete (that's his name) and go off and see the world. When I lived in Japan and Korea, teaching English or writing English books, I hardly wrote poems. But I was always writing in my head, always observing, always feeling, always imagining. I was living which is what poetry is about and where it comes from: you live something you must make the body of the poem out of it or it isn't real or you lose what it taught you or how it transformed you and then there is no sharing through a reader or a listener of what you lived. Again, correspondence. It's such a huge part of art and making art, especially necessary art, like the stuff that saves people's lives or leads them even further into the cul-de-sacs. Like Almodovar's All About My Mother.
I just go back to the poem I can't figure out later. Doesn't make one very prolific. But, then again, the time always has to be right for me and thankfully it always arrives, that dawn of knowing or recognition.
12 - If there was a fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?
My dog. Sabrina. Non-human nature is the most prominent teacher in my life. That said, I don't know much about flowers or plants. I'd love to learn more though.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
He's right. But, of course, for some of us, books come from music or movies or people we've known or conversations we've had or eavesdropped on or oral histories passed down through family or community members, among so many other sources.
Poems happen that way. Individual poems, long poems, sequences, vignettes. I am writing a poem at the moment that begins from the refrain heard in Wong Kar-Wai's film, Happy Together: "We could start over?"
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
From 11 pm to 3 am. These hours produce the bulk of my writing. They are very sensitive, fragile hours and, unfortunately, even a disagreement with a friend or a misunderstanding with a family member can upset a kind of emotional balance I need in order to write. This is why I cannot socialize a lot when I am actively feeling like I am working on something with an ending or that will end soon and will be the next book or poem.
At the moment, a particular rendition of a jazz classic is important to my work. The Miles Davis Quintet Live in Tokyo performing a 12 minute My Funny Valentine. Bliss. Instant inspiration. You can dream so deeply in this Valentine! Because so much of The Pornography of Harry Persaud is influenced by old jazz vocal standards, I just melt every time I listen to it and I write with the feeling that Harry will have a conclusion and people will get a chance to hear the poems being read live.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
God, I'd love to travel through South America and leave Guyana for the very last destination! I'd love to travel across Canada with an impossible man and feel myself falling in love as we make our way into Manitoba. Well, I'd take the opportunity just to see more of Canada and write about it. I guess, in terms of writing, I would LOVE to make travel writing that people would enjoy reading.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
All my dream jobs are in writing or publishing contexts. I REALLY admire editors of small or large publishing houses, magazines, zines, etc. I love film critics and really good film criticism. Anything in these areas.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Just had to. And, it's the only thing that I feel certain about.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I don't know about books because I haven't read a novel in awhile and I tend to read only sections or parts of the non-fictions that draw me in. But, I will say, about poems, I have been rereading a lot of Leonard Cohen, Flowers For Hitler and Parasites of Heaven, in particular. I am always reading and rereading and thinking about the work of Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. (Neruda destroys and rebuilds me each and every time. Oh God! Don't get me started!)
Let The Right One In is an AMAZING film. I think about that film constantly. I think it's a masterpiece and I'll feel the same way about it forever. I felt that way about Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europaand still do.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am pulling The Best Ghosts in the World into its final version and I am writing The Pornography of Harry Persaud. That's enough. And, I am fortunate enough to have the time to be able to focus just on these works.
Some early versions of the Harry Persaud stuff were anthologized last year in Our Caribbean, Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke UP), edited by the amazing Thomas Glave. It's done very well!
There's quite a lot actually of work going on my study. There are some other poems that I've started writing that I want for something bigger, something about the erotics of foreignness. We'll see what happens.
Rebecca had been able to project her emotions since the day she was born, when everything was dark and then suddenly it was bright and there were colours. Rebecca didn’t know where she was going. She hadn’t known there was somewhere to go. It hurt and there was no way to resist. She couldn’t focus her eyes, didn’t know she had eyes, and didn’t know that the light and the colours were coming through them.
When hands first touched her, Rebecca didn’t know what hands were, what skin was, what touch was. Only that the thub-thub was missing. There had been darkness and the thub-thub, and they’d been consistent and soothing, but now both were missing. The newborn Rebecca became quite distressed. Feelings of great anxiety and fear went through her and they did not stop there. They went into the room. They went inside everyone. The doctor stopped and stared at the baby in his hands. The nurses turned from the stainless steel tray and stared helplessly at each other. The hum of the machine became audible.
Finally, after the magnificent little novel All My Friends Are Superheroes (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2003), comes Toronto writer Andrew Kaufman’s second novel, The Waterproof Bible (Toronto ON: Random House Canada, 2010). In two books now, Kaufman has managed to write powerful, redemptive novels, of love lost and found, suspending belief in the best of these possible worlds he is able to create. His utterly charming first novel, All My Friends Are Superheroes, wrote out a world much like ours, except that many of the characters supposedly had powers; they certainly had superhero names. In this new work, The Waterproof Bible, there exists a world much like ours, but one of the main characters, Rebecca, broadcasts her innermost thoughts and feelings, and an entire race of Aquatics exist (a result of the Biblical flood), able to breathe both water and air, with a religion that tells them that to live on the land is sinful.
Kaufman’s two books highlight just how possible it is that the truth can be best explored and best found through fiction, writing the truths of Rebecca, contemplating the outcome of finally learning to leave the entirety of her past behind her, her newly widower brother-in-law Lewis, who loses everything, seeking out answers in the most unlikely places, and the function of throwing everything away before able to actually discover anything. He writes a cast of characters that slowly expand, but never feels cluttered, from the water-breathing and unwatered Aberystwyth, searching the dry earth for her lost mother, clutching her bible; to a character who claims to be God; to the father and son rainmakers who are both called for the same job, but refuse to acknowledge the other; or Margaret, who runs the hotel where Rebecca’s ex-husband works and waits for something that may never happen, and constructing his boat on dry prairie. The Waterproof Bible is a book that shows off some of the best of what fiction is capable of, much like the works of Milan Kundera, able to hold the fine lines between light and dark, heart, religion, disbelief and hard truths, combining without collision or contradiction the complexities of living in a way so few writers can. Kaufman knows how to write and not overwrite (as so many do); writing out just enough detail to make a point before continuing. For those fortunate enough to have read All My Friends Are Superheroes, this is the follow-up that we’ve all been waiting for.
“I thought God might be a little better at shooting hoops,” Lewis said. Lisa glared at him, but Lewis was unable to eliminate the smile from his face. “I’ll give you a ten-point lead if you answer one simple question.”
“Shoot.”
“Where do we go when we die?”
“Go get the ball,” Lisa said, setting her hands on her hips. Lewis nodded and ran to the grass, returning with the ball. He passed it to her and Lisa dribbled it three times. “I have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t died, and I never will. Mortality is your thing, not mine.” Raising the ball, Lisa shot. The ball hit the rim and bounced back onto the grass.
Digging through boxes recently, I discovered a few extra copies of older chapbooks considered out-of-print (just what will he discover next? ). 2010 subscriptions still available.
1. John Barton. DESTINATIONS, LEAVING THE MAP. Published in an edition of 100 copies, September 12, 1995, for a reading by John Barton at the TREE Reading Series. 16 pages. The poems later appeared as part of Sweet Ellipsis (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1998). Barton is current editor of The Malahat Review. $40.
3. Barry McKinnon. in the millennium. Published in an edition of 250 copies, April 2000. Cover design & production by jwcurry (on gestetner). Later appeared as part of In The Millennium (New Star Books, 2009). 12 pages. $30.
4. George Bowering as “Ellen Field.” A, You’re Adorable. Published in an edition of 200 copies, October 1998 (later reprinted admitting Bowering’s authorship by above/ground press, October 2004). A fraction appeared in (where Bowering first publicly admits the pseudonym) in Changing on the Fly, The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering (Vancouver BC: Polestar Books, 2004), and later, in full, in his Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006). 28 pages. $40.
5. PURDYESQUE. Ed. rob mclennan. Published in an edition of 250 copies, May 2006, for a poetry reading on May 7th, 2006 as part of the conference “Al / Purdy: The Ivory Thought” at the University of Ottawa (May 5-7, 2006). Poems by George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Gwendolyn Guth, Steven Heighton & rob mclennan. 24 pages. $10.
Add $1 for postage; outside Canada, all prices in US currency (& add another $2 for postage). Make cheques payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset Street West, main floor, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7
because i chose reason i aged so on trains where all women must choose, all the passengers women and the engineers men what a flat landscape with leaves and light though i had two choices in an organization to join the women, and we all play with time, join the women who secretly travel within our limited chronology in order to kill (but their victims dont really die) losing consciousness temporarily to kill, who travel in time back and forth within our limited sociology and politics our limited understanding (decades) in order to kill for their side (but its said their victims dont really die) or make my choice to be myself and age rapidly secretly in place, in one sole weekend have aged enough to be secretly 81 years old the advantages of doing this arent stated when my companion on the first train says to the little girl near us ‘would you believe that shes 81 years old?’ i haven’t chosen action, have i chosen wisely choosing to age secretly without killing people who dont really die or should i (“The City Is Somewhere in the Center of the Church”)
From Griffin Prize-winner (for her 2001 collection, Disobedience) Alice Notley comes the expansive Reason and Other Women (Tucson AZ: Chax Press, 2010), working its way through the whole of reason as not just a concept, but a character, writing out story and marrative. I’ve always been impressed with Notley’s use of language and just how much text she manages to use, in poems big, long and expansive. Notley is very much a poet of sentences, sweeping movements and rhythms, and must almost be read aloud to get the full measure. As she writes near the end of her two-page preface:
My individual poems unintentionally came to resemble mosaics, with a lightlike flickeringness across words which could seem cast into pieces or flowing in shapes. Each poem is based on the number six, which I have read was the most serious number for the Byzantines, being composed of two times three. Each of my stanzas had to contain a number of lines that was a multiple or factor of six: this includes the number one, and thus there is an occasional non-stanzaic monolith.
There is the question of genre. Is this a poem, a collection of stories, or a representation of a psyche (using the word to mean both soul and the self as those two entities overlap or diverge)? All of those. Is it poetry or prose? It is of course poetry, which is much more a matter of sound and compression than of white space and line breaks. I am, as I’ve often said, trying to steal story back from prose to poetry, but I’m trying [to] steal more than that. I want to steal back the sense that any subject and any written undertaking is as suitable to poetry as it is to prose. The first writings seem to have been business accounts, and that is not a genre; everything thereafter was at first written in poetry. And why not?
With this, Notley describes her collection broken up into parts, of prose and poems, of poetic prose with line breaks and lines, moving through icon, fragment and spirituality. Notley’s are poems that write the story of the poem of the story as a spread, each piece adding in, and moving further out, as an accumulation of sentences. In Reason and Other Women, Notley very much shows herself as a poet of sentences, of accumulated sentences, writing a flow of certainty, despite adding extra words, extra cadences, to deliberately trip. Is this Notley making sure you’re awake, and paying attention? Perhaps she worries the reader might get caught up in the flow, hypnotized by the lyrical cadence that she has to add in a speedbump or two.
these old walls are pure because i’m so real
leftover sloughing guards the structure in the atrium
and the skull the talkative bird dome
who says that such sloughing’s periodic, but now am bone boniest bare.
so how enter the cathedral past that live snake in the door? (“Entering the Building”)
In the preface to the collection, Notley talks about how the collection is influenced by Byzantium churches and art, running threads very central to this collection back through her earlier work, as well as religion, dreams, houses, icons and epics, including Byzantine Parables(1998) or the previously-unpublished sections of her most recent selected, Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006)[see my review of such here], her in-progress “Benediction,” writing: “I was supposed to stay interested in the testimony of the great mystics as of the great / poets but I only care about my own now. It seems to me that I am in that deep state at the same time as when I am angry or sad for example it doesnt preclude affect it contains / it.” It’s as though the poems that make up Reason and Other Women achieve a particular kind of focus for earlier ideas, skirting the line between the mythic/sacred and the personal, such a touchstone through four decades of publishing.
the figure of reason appears to me. what is she
in connection with the formlessness of the mind, what is she
in the mind. and not governed by will
and doesnt just come because willed
and isnt learned. (“The Body Is in the Soul”)
I've been up for such before, even before I knew it existed, & very nearly won; this year I know about it, & am intrigued to see how the whole thing plays out (vote early, vote often, etc). Does that make it better or worse, participating, pushing? Should I just quietly leave alone, & let the universe unfold as it should?
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Writing Iowa changed my life because it made me re-think time. I wanted to write a book that explored the art of memory using sentences. Normally when I write sentences about my memory I have a very cause-and-effect type of thing going on, and I wanted to push against that because I'm not so sure time actually works in a cause-and-effect way. So I tried to write lyric sentences like those in Lyn Hejinian's My Lifeand Joe Brainard's I Remember, but with a little more Midwestern black metal. So that "changed my life" in the sense that it fucked up my idea of time. As far as publication goes, I haven't really thought about that changing my life. My life seems basically the same.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wrote a poem in fourth grade called "I Cry Behind Closed Doors." It was amazing and I received a lot of positive feedback from the girls.
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?
It's all a big mess. In that movieA Mighty Windthere's a scene where Eugene Levy's character is in the mental hospital writing songs. He stares out into space for a good long while, then an idea comes to him and he attacks the notebook furiously with his pen. That's what it's like for me. And all that attacking yields monstrous results I then have to soberly try to edit into something that plays well with others. That takes a decent amount of work, but not a long time really.
4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction 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 superstructure of my writing is my life, so I just tinker along doing what I do and writing down my little thoughts and then gather them together in some kind of book afterward.
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 really like them. I'd get competitive and try my best to "win" the reading, but somewhere along the way I realized that I often lost by winning, or any victory was Pyrrhic because I just kind of made an ass of myself and people laughed. Laughter is often a sign that the reading is not going well. Anyways, now I'm just kind of terrified of doing them. Why am I up here reading these things aloud to people? I find I have to resist the urge to apologize for my existence while up on a stage. But maybe I can just take the time now to offer a blanket apology: Sorry everybody. I tried to do better.
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?
Most all of my concerns are theoretical. That's what makes them concerns. I'm not concerned about fixing the tire on my bike--that's more something to do-- but I am concerned about how my use of language messes with my sense of time. But I think the current questions are the same as the previous questions and will be the same as the future questions. I haven't figured out exactly what these questions are, but I'm sure they don't change.
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 writers should offer a different perspective than the dominant one, so I think their roles in the larger culture are by nature limited. I think a lot of writers don't offer any kind of difference in their perspective, and so they are more widely accepted. I think there should be resistance. That's part of the fun.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh both for sure. I love editors. I've been privileged to work with some really good ones. I think more people should listen to their editors.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"See that? That's shit. And this? Shinola."
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
None of it is really easy, but I don't completely see a difference between the two. It's all écriture.
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?
Lately it's all just emails. I write a lot of (increasingly crappy) emails. I feel like I used to write really lovely emails--long and personal with a lot of really witty turns of phrase. But now they're all just clipped and efficient. It's like my frontal lobe just atrophied. I still do try to attack the notebook everyday, or let it attack me, but a lot of times we just look at each other forlornly.
And I usually wake up, take a shower, make tea, then read for about half an hour and write a sentence or two if I'm lucky. Then it's on the train for half an hour to work. Then emails.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don't really have a go-to writer. I usually just try to sit and be quiet for about half an hour. Something usually comes up after that.
13 - What do you really want?
To be at peace with time.
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?
Oh, everything. I'm a big fan of the outside world. I find that staring at a wall can be inspiring, or listening to people on the train, or baking bread. I mean, I love books but why restrict yourself? Every time I think I know what I should do, what books I should read, how to be, I find that the outside world surprises me by knowing more about all of these things than I do. I think burrowing into books is great, but I also like to ride my bicycle around town.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
The list is so long it's not really worth going into. If you have ideas of things to do, let me know. I'd probably be up for it.
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've had a little experience working with sustainable agriculture, and I think if I weren't so self-involved and prone to spending long hours indoors I'd like to work with helping people eat real food. But I really was doomed from the start to be a writer.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The language virus from outer space zapped me early, so like I say I was doomed. I probably would have been a bitter, frustrated writer (blog commenter?) if I hadn't had great teachers who gave me positive feedback. So I'm very grateful for that.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I don't know if it's "great," but I really liked reading the tributes to kari edwards in No Gender. And I've been on a David Gordon Green kick lately, so anything by him. Both are very inspiring to me in their own way.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm thinking a lot about internet commenters and rage-filled middle aged white men, so I've been tinkering around with some writing related to that. It's kind of spooky stuff and isn't a place I like to be, but I deal with it day to day anyway, so I thought I might as well see if I could get anything ecstatic out of it.
Published as the first winner of the First Furniture Press Poetry Prize is Calgary author Emily Carr’s Directions for Flying, 36 fits: a young wife’s almanac (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2010). Carr has been appearing in more than a few places lately, including a chapbook with above/ground press in 2009, and another 2010 trade collection as prize-winner, her 13 ways of happily: books 1 & 2 that Cole Swensen chose as the winner of the New Measures Poetry Prize in 2009, now forthcoming later this year with Parlor Press. In her two-page “postscript,” included along with the press release, she begins by writing:
The first thing you should know is that between finishing this manuscript (which she privately refers to as “sprawl”) and writing these notes, Emily Carr turned 29, 30, 31… So I can only speculate on the person who wrote these poems. She was 28 when she started writing them, 29 when she finished. She moved from the Midwest (her childhood home) to North Carolina, fallen in love, had an abortion, eloped, made a suicide gesture involving Zoloft & sherry, and moved to Canada. She became, for the first time, a seasonal creature. She had forgotten winter and, in the fog of her despair, moved straight into the thick of it, to a sunny, austere, cold province on the right hand of the Canadian Rockies.
Trying to stay in love. OK. That’s the plot. Three years later, She’d elaborate: trying to stay in love by contaminating the literary with the human. And vice versa. The human with the literary. She believes that reality is a theory for literature, and literature is a theory for reality. She doesn’t want to be framed. She wants to build her own frame. She’s read Lucky and Jane and she’s watched reality television and talk shows and in sixth grade for Sunday School she read the Bible cover to cover and now that she’s married she’s read legal tracts and A Short History of Nearly Everything and Raymond Carver and she’s seen at least three therapists and cashed in prescriptions for but not actually taken at least three antidepressants. She can’t commit herself to any of these frames. She carries inside her a history of reading and misreading.
Carved into months, running April to March, three poems per month, the pieces that make up her Directions for Flying, 36 fits: a young wife’s almanac are cut so sharp they make the fingers bleed while reading, and the blood on the pages include that of the author. Phyllis Webb told us that the best response to a poem is another poem, and Carr’s poems go further, that the best response to anything might be a poem, writing her “36 fits” that respond to not only the heart, but a canon of contemporary poets and poetry, a very worthy reading list that includes Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, C.D. Wright, Juliana Spahr, Kathleen Fraser, Virginia Woolf, Forrest Gander, Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson.
fog (n.) after Mark Cox
this garbled constellation
of melody & speech rings & rings
in the empty kitchen, agitating
to say things, to address
every gash. opens like a locket
brandishing pictures. for years
I have held it out to others, a stethoscope
please. please, stop
listening. it may well be coyotes’
shameless weeping, the horrible
clucking of a chicken in a burlap sack
the terrible keening of a life
trying to reenter
that young body by leaping over
the sun-splattered sill
It’s as though Carr writes the silences amid and between things through these poems, these months, coda’d by a “working note: or, / the dream of an audience” in a long, singular column that ends with:
locating the pronoun at its moment of alteration
which is/ in other words, a love story, the whole
thing/ just trying to be/ in love. that’s the plot.
If there is a plot here, Carr certainly wants you to see one thing, whether or not it’s the true lot, or one the narrator is forcing over. And what is the function of this two-page “postscript,” slipped in with the press release? Is it meant to be read inside the scope of the final published work, or as something further, seemingly extended or even adrift from the text?
Through Carr, this is a language poetry of the heart, and one rips and tears through the other with such flailing precision that emotion pours, and each word falls perfectly in place.
piano (n.) after Nicole Brossard
therapy? a piece of furniture,
beautifully shaped.
has soft & hard
parts like a body. under, in:
a great storage space.
an aquarium. the sudden realization
of being
just better sandwiched.
childhood & lens/ nothing
without a bench/ might have been
caressing a prior a stroke
against a stem spluttering
Greensleeve Editions is an Edmonton-based micro-press that publishes transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing. Founder, publisher, and in-house editor, Mark McCawley, is the author of ten chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most recently, Sick Lazy Fuck (Black Bile Press, 2009), Collateral Damage (Coracle Press, 2008), as well as Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002).
1 – When did Greensleeve Editions first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
Greensleeve Editions first began in July, 1988, with the publication of my first poetry chapbook, Fragile Harvest/Fragile Lives. Although primarily a poetry publisher to begin with - fifty chapbook titles within the first five years of operation - I had long considered the short story to be a perfect fit for the chapbook format. By the mid 1990s, the micro-press had transitioned from being primarily a poetry press to a publisher of transgressive, urban post-realist writing and fiction. All along I had had the opportunity to publish some leading edge work by some now very well known CanLit writers - Excerpts from the journals of Alberta Borges by Janice Williamson, QHS by mary howes, Working Stiffs by Ken Rivard, The Job After The One Before by Jones, The Divining Rod by Stephen Morrissey, and Letters of the Alphabet by Carolyn Zonailo - to name only a handful. Throughout the process of micro-press, or chapbook, publishing for over twenty years now, I have learned the importance of sticking close to one's creative guns, so to speak, and not being afraid of failure or making mistakes. As a publisher, I've made some big ones. You learn and move on to the next title.
2 – What first brought you to publishing?
As with a lot of young writers, what first brought me to publishing was the impulse to see my work in print. Also was a long time love affair with the chapbook format. While trade books can sometimes make a writer seem impersonal and distant - I've never lost that feeling when holding a chapbook that the writer is "in my hands".
3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
I can't speak for other micro-press publishers, but my own personal publishing credo has always been to provide a venue, or a vehicle, for new writing to emerge, especially if that writing is transgressive and post-realist.
4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
Greensleeve Editions is a micro-press interested primarily in publishing transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing concerned with the struggles of hard edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture - presented in their most raw and unpretentious form. To that end, Greensleeve publishes chapbooks, litzines, and weblogs to further this particular publishing mandate. Since 1993, Greensleeve has published the litzine Urban Graffiti, featuring new fiction and poetry by Jones, Matthew Firth, Bill Brown, Michael Bryson, Sonia Saikaley Neale McDevitt, Hal Niedzviecki, Clint Burnham, bart plantenga, Philip Quinn, Angela Hibbs, Vern Smith, G.R. Gustafson, Jason Heroux, David Groulx, Jeffrey Mackie, T. Anders Carson, and Nathaniel George Moore. Urban Graffiti is presently preparing it's eleventh issue, Vice and Debauchery. Although in the very early stages, I am currently contemplating the publication of a "Best Of..." anthology.
5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
Any way possible. Mail. Word-of-mouth. Internet. Be as inventive as you possibly can be. Make every launch "an event". Attempt to launch your titles in unconventional venues such as bars, nightclubs, etc. During the launch of the zines Urban Graffiti X and Splurge 2, Greensleeve Editions hired several local Edmonton bands at a Southside Edmonton bar. The zines were included in the cover charge. After the cost of the zines were covered, and the bands were paid, the evening's profits went to a local charity which ran a Street Newspaper devoted to Edmonton's homeless. That night, everyone won. Still, what venture may work one time, may not another. Network with other micro-presses. In the end, what aids one micro-press, aids all micro-presses. To that end, I've started the weblog, Fresh Raw Cuts, to review micro-press titles, and direct readers to where they can purchase these titles. Of course, what helps my fellow micro-press publishers, also assists myself and my press.
6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
I am your basic editor. It's my role to make the writer's work come across as clearly and succinctly as possible, not to rewrite or rework the manuscript or submission. Either the manuscript or submission will fit the mandate of the press, or it will not. By the time I solicit a chapbook manuscript from a writer, I'm already well acquainted with their style and abilities, and any editing on my part is usually quite minor. On the other hand, the litzine I publish, Urban Graffiti accepts unsolicited submissions and therefore requires a firmer editorial hand. Still, only between five and ten percent of submissions for the litzine are accepted for a given issue. That said, except for basic editing and proofing, accepted submissions are accepted as is.
7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Greensleeve Edition chapbooks and zines are distributed through mail-order. Print runs range from 100 to 250 copies per print run. Greensleeve Edition chapbooks and zines are individually rubber stamped for authenticity.
8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
Between 1988 and 2004, I was solely responsible for editing and production of Greensleeve Edition titles. In 1991, though, there was a brief collaboration between Greensleeve Editions and Unfinished Monument Press with the publication of Small Press Lynx: an anthology of small press writers and their writers, edited by Mark McCawley and Chris Faiers. From 2004 onward, my son Devin McCawley has taken an active part in the production and co-publishing of Greensleeve Edition titles, while I am still the chief editor and publisher.
Are there benefits or drawbacks to working with other editors? For the most part, I find too many editors, like too many cooks, tend to ruin the dish. For that reason, I've avoided editorial collectives both as a publisher and as a writer - group think has always been antithetical to true creativity.
9 – How has being (an editor/publisher) changed the way you think about your own writing?
Immensely. I have witnessed my own writing, over the last twenty years or so, viewed first with scorn and contempt then with something akin to acceptance (albeit within the micro-press community and the CanLit underground). All that has really changed, frankly, is public perception. Micro-presses have always been the route for new, transgressive writing. The internet has only served to magnify this process even more so. What was once considered a pariah of Canadian publishing, and not taken at all seriously by writers and academics alike, has swiftly changed in a dozen short years. What does this mean for my own writing? I don't know. One thing is certain, though, my writing has always been welcome at Canada's micro-presses, and will continue to be so, because Canada's micro-presses have always been the source of innovation and creativity in an otherwise bland publishing landscape.
10 – How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
Totally irrelevant. I have published my own writing quite often. If I don't do it, who will? Especially if your writing is transgressive? I suspect if one looks into the publishing history of, say, a Gary Geddes, one is bound to uncover a certain amount of academic nepotism. It's impossible to avoid, particularly in a publishing industry as small and insular as Canada's. Geddes is no better, and no worse, than any other editor for the press anywhere else, and no less guilty or innocent. I'd much rather see new writing published no matter where, or by whom. As is, the same CanLit writers seem to be published again and again while new writers continue to work their craft in obscurity. What does this say about the current state of Canada's publishing industry?
11 – How do you see Greensleeve Editions evolving?
I see Greensleeve Editions continuing to evolve as a micro-press as it has from it's humble beginnings. While Greensleeve will continue to publish transgressive poetry and short fiction chapbooks, I see the litzine Urban Graffiti eventually evolving into a completely web based entity. I can forsee the day when, as publisher, I'm arrested for obscenity for the publication of one of my chapbooks. I look forward to that day. I just wonder who the writer will be...
12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
As a publisher, I am proud of the many risk-taking writers who have allowed me to publish their work over the last twenty years - poets, short fiction writers, novelists. I am proud of the many titles I have been able to publish on a shoestring budget. Most of all, I'm proud of all the issues of the litzine, Urban Graffiti, and all the writers who appeared in its pages.
What do I think people have overlooked about Greensleeve Editions publications? Easy. Their existence, especially within Alberta. In many cases, I couldn't give Greensleeve Edition chapbooks and zines away in Alberta - particularly to the rare books library at the University of Alberta, and the special collections library of the Edmonton Public Library - even for free. While the Rare Books Library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has a complete collection of Greensleeve Edition chapbooks and zines - which they paid for, too - Libraries in my own community don't consider them at all worthwhile.
13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
In 1988, there were no micro-presses in Edmonton. All the micro-presses I knew of were based elsewhere - mostly in Toronto. My early Greensleeve titles were modeled after some of those Toronto chapbooks I had collected up until that time - Unfinished Monument Press, Streetcar Editions, Pink Dog Press, Proper Tales Press.
14 – How does Greensleeve work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see your books in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
Quite a few writers have mistaken Greensleeve Editions for a Toronto press. Can I blame them? A transgressive publisher based in Edmonton? Smack dab in the middle of Alberta's Bible Belt? It has proved somewhat more difficult when it comes to engaging the immediate literary community - which is perfectly fine if you write and publish poetry (Edmonton has always had a very vibrant poetry community along with an annual poetry festival), yet very little for the emerging short fiction writer.
As a micro-press publisher, I am in constant dialogue with other publishers - particularly Matthew Firth's Black Bile Press who I view both as kindred to my own press (we often publish many of the same new writers) and my own writing as well. What assists Black Bile Press will most assuredly assist Greensleeve Editions in the long run. Networking and communication between micro-presses can only benefit everyone concerned.
15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
I hold "launches" or "events" as I call them with the publication of each issue of the zine, or chapbook. Early on - between 1988 and 1993 - Greensleeve held regular public readings at a local Downtown Edmonton gallery, coordinating chapbook publication with author readings, some local, some from out of province. It's worthwhile if one can accomplish it. Now it is easier to focus on the individual event.
16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
Yes. I use the internet, Facebook in particular, to advertise calls for submissions for Urban Graffiti, and to promote a launch or event at a given venue.
17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
I presently take submissions only for the litzine, Urban Graffiti. Chapbook manuscripts are by solicitation only. All queries welcome.
18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
Urban Graffiti X was a special issue of the litzine because not only did it reach the tenth issue, it was also a transgressive tour-de-force of new writing by Philip Quinn, Bill Brown, Neale McDevitt, bart plantenga, and Angela Hibbs.
The Job After The One Before by Daniel Jones. Besides Jones' story "1978" which I published in UG #1, The Job... is probably the perfect Greensleeve chapbook. Four linked stories that will give the fan of Jones' fiction deeper insight into The People One Knows: Toronto Stories.
Just Another Asshole: Short Stories by Mark McCawley. In these loosely linked stories of one man's descent into middle age madness, poverty, and degradation in Edmonton's big empty.
