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 didn’t so much change my life as change how I felt about it; it was something I never expected to happen, and
that nobody can take away from me. And it also, I’m sure, opened the door to
further publications and new readers. And knowing you’re being read, though it
sounds blindingly obvious, is the most important thing, because (for me) what
matters most about a poem is never the poet; it’s always the reader.
To have a
second book published so soon, by a publisher (Gaspereau Press) of some of my
favourite poets (Robert Bringhurst, George Elliott Clarke, Peter Sanger, Jan Zwicky), was almost more surprising, as was Gaspereau’s faith in my most
experimental styles. The feeling of intense relief
wasn’t repeated, but the thrill was certainly deeper – together with the
same, incomparable excitement at the prospect of reaching a wider
audience.
2 - How
did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Why do
you assume I came to poetry first? Until I was 16, I most loved writing
stories, then essays, and almost never wrote poetry. Then, though I’ve
continued to write fiction, poetry took hold of me (it really felt like a possession) and hasn’t let go. Why it
happened so suddenly and powerfully, I don’t know: I’d enjoyed reading poetry
since I was about 12 (Wordsworth, Dylan Thomas), and certainly felt and
respected its power, but never heard it calling to me.
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?
Well, the
pattern for me has been to concentrate on one major, long-term project while
writing other poetry as spontaneously as possible. And I try to take long
breaks between projects, as they usually end up exhausting me. At the moment,
for example, I’m coming to the final phase of a project called Shadowgraphs (which I’ll talk about
later) I began in 2006; an earlier project, The
Butterfly Nets (almost entirely unpublished), lasted from 1993 to 2000. In
both cases, the experimental techniques I use involve multiple drafts and
(hopefully) distillations; it’s all fairly laborious and painstaking, and not
always alchemical!
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?
My two
books consist of separate pieces which I think and hope work well together, but
weren’t written with a collection in mind. The two projects I mentioned were
certainly conceived and premeditated as a single whole, though with each part
(ideally) strong enough to stand alone.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I waited
so long – over 20 years – for any appreciable success that public readings are
a real thrill and privilege, and something I prepare for very intensely. I
can’t imagine this will ever change; the ‘high’ I feel, and can sometimes sense
in the room, is, well, highly addictive.
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?
These are
good but hard questions, so what I’d like to do is reproduce a short ‘Author’s
Statement’ Gaspereau Press asked me for when Incitements was published. I called it ‘Dreamscapes: a Note on
Motive and Method,’ and I wanted it to be included in the book itself, as I
think it addresses questions many readers have about my work. I hope it’s not
too long:
“Incitements consists
of three experimental responses to other texts: White Salt Mountain by Peter Sanger, a creative meditation on the
poetic nexus of psyche and place; Seashores: Summer Nature Notes for Nova Scotians, by Merritt Gibson; and Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone,
a fictionalized account of a Berlin couple’s bizarrely heroic postcard-writing
campaign against Nazism. All three works are admirable prose achievements; my
intent, in each case, was to tap the immense poetic energy I sensed in the
writing – to enter (as it felt like) the subconscious world, or dreamscape, of each book. All prose, I
believe, exhibits, or rather disguises, such a structure: presents a surface
that, seen from above, conceals its own depth. Deploying a variety of
techniques – indebted principally to William Burroughs’ dada-inspired ‘cut-up’
method – I try in these sequences to get under
that skin, pearl-dive to the astonishing ‘underworld’: a place of relentless
imagistic flux, metaphoric excess, a quantum poetics unbound by, yet somehow
binding, the classical rules of ‘reality’. When you “look under rocks,” Merritt Gibson cautioned, remember: “the animals that live on the undersurface are
different from those that live on the uppersurface.” So it is when we dream
(and perhaps when we die): so it is when we turn language’s stone.”
As
Marx said, the point of philosophy isn’t to describe but change the world; and
poetry, I believe, has the power to change how people see the world, including,
crucially, the world of language. Whether the world notices is, however,
another question – your next one, in fact!
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
poetry, in a prosaic world, is resistance:
Yeats’ ‘centre’ has fallen apart to such an extent that just to be poetic today is subversive. I like to
turn Adorno’s famous formulation around: poetry after Auschwitz, he said, is
impossible – but what if it was prose that
made Auschwitz possible? By prose I mean all unpoetic, uncreative, mechanical,
dead language: the denial and attempted extermination of the poetic dimension
of all existence and experience. The haunting question isn’t the quality or
integrity of poetic resistance but its effectiveness, its cultural resonance.
8 - Do
you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential
(or both)?
I don’t
know how unusual this is, but neither of my books required any real editing,
other than minor questions of style and consistency. I think, though, that I’m
a pretty harsh editor of my own stuff, and I know that I often hate working
with myself!
9 - What
is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)?
What do you see as the appeal?
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’m lucky
enough to have the time and space to write at home most weekdays. Early morning
(6-10) is often my favourite and best time to write poetry; in the afternoons I
tend to turn to other kinds of work and writing. I also love walking, as the
best way to let new ideas come to me, or solve some nagging problems.
12 - When
your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a
better word) inspiration?
My
problem, so far, has been overwriting,
being swamped by The Thing, as opposed to writer’s block. When I get
overloaded, walking helps enormously, as does listening to some types of music
(none of it vocal), especially intense jazz. Luckily, I don’t often struggle
with what to write about. My main project,
for instance – the Shadowgraphs mule
behind which I’ve spent hundreds of hours ‘ploughing’ – is an experimental
rewriting, or rigorous subversion, of every Nobel physics lecture delivered in
the 20th century (150 in total – 149 by men!), so the subject matter
and main themes are all there in front of you.
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
I lived
in England until my mid-thirties, and one of the things I miss (though I love
Cape Breton) is watching cricket: so the fragrance of freshly cut grass in the
summer often produces a quite powerful nostalgia, and not just for the sport
itself but all the family, friends and places associated with it.
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?
My
predominant style is experimental – lyrical, I hope, but also fragmentary, momentary, non-sequential,
non-confessional and non-narrative. Using cut-up and collage also generates
random or spontaneous images (at least as a first stage in the process). I
think I can say I’ve been drawn to this approach more by certain forms of music
than writing – free jazz escaping the ‘narrative’ confines of melody and
harmony, the incorporation of chance into composition by Cage and Stockhausen,
and, most importantly to me now, the ‘moment-form’ music of Webern, many of
whose works, as Stockhausen said, “are so very short, we can call
them moments, though they weren’t called so at the time: the critics didn’t
know what to call them. It’s music that is extremely condensed, pieces only
twelve seconds, twenty seconds long. Just hanging in the air: nothing derived
and nothing followed, that was it.” That’s how I’d love to write, though I
still have a long way to go.
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
In terms
of method, the most important influence is obviously Burroughs, though my view
of language as revelatory and inexhaustible comes primarily from Joyce (who,
I’d say, came to his view through
Blake). I have many favourite poets, while still returning often to my ‘first
love,’ Wordsworth. And it was Basho who first made me fall in love with ‘micro’
poetry (haiku being pure ‘moment-form’ art).
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
There are
lots of things I’d like to do that I can’t
do, playing jazz being first on the list (just above mime and acting). In
terms of poetry, I hope I have many more years to ‘fail better’ at writing like
Webern!
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?
Again, if
I had the talent, jazz. And if I hadn’t become a writer? I’ll be quite honest:
I’m pretty sure I’d be dead.
18 - What
made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t
know. As I mentioned, when poetry grabbed hold of me it possessed me: I felt like I found and lost myself at the same time.
This sounds (and may be) absurd, but I didn’t know who I was before I became
someone else!
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
20 - What
are you currently working on?
Shadowgraphs,
Shadowgraphs…
