12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Heady

Poet and essayist Sarah Heady writes on human geography, American history, and the built environment. She is the author of Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award in poetry. Her manuscript "Corduroy Road" was a finalist for the 2013 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Prize. Sarah is a founding member of the New Philadelphia Poets, a writing and performance collective whose work was featured at the Philly Fringe Festival, the Bowery Poetry Club, and the Kelly Writers House. In 2013 she was a writer-in-residence at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska. A native of New York’s Hudson Valley, Sarah currently makes her home in San Francisco.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
When I found out the book was getting published, it was so invigorating and validating. Kind of like coming in from building a snowman, and your mom hands you a cup of hot chocolate, and you drink it and get all re-warmed and then go back out into the cold. Which is fun too, but sometimes you just need a little shot of something to keep you going. It’s been about six months since Niagara Transnational came out, and those months have been some of the most exhilarating in my life—I have a lot of energy to put feelers out into the world, and I’m more confident as an artist and a human being.

The book of poems I’m writing now is quite different from my last project—it’s more serious in tone, less goofy, less sarcastic. Equally dark. Equally full of women. More spacious on the page. I’m really into tiny poems right now.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve written poems since I was a kid, but I think I actually started with stories. I wrote a sci-fi book in second grade called Invaders in Chicago, about an alien takeover. Then there was my Holocaust poetry phase in middle school. I haven’t kept up an interest in either of these subject areas.

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 typically write poems in a sort of furious free-writing trance, and it takes me a very long time (usually many months) to revisit and polish them. And most of those will never make it into a book; they’re just practice. The ones that make it will do so because they are circling around something larger, I guess. I try not to revise poems to death. If I make big changes, it’s in the form of shaving away the excess shit from the good stuff.

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?
Poems come either from sound in the air or from an existing historical source I'm working with, maybe both. In the case of my first book, they came from vintage postcards. I don’t know. I’m too new to this to have a pattern yet. I’m terrified of putting together my next manuscript. But yes, right now I'm in "project" mode.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I adore readings, maybe because they’re the only performative act I can handle without panicking. I have a deathly fear of acting, for instance. So I feel like more of a whole person when I can capably get in front of an audience. And when you have an audience that’s really listening, it’s the best feeling. I am so honored by people’s willingness to give their attention to my art.

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?
My overarching concern seems to be one of place—why does our physical environment look the way it does? It’s a process of historical excavation, and it sucks almost everything into its vortex. Sometimes I feel ill thinking about it, other times so grateful for even having a world to dig through. I think that sound (poetry) can be a little flake chipped off a monolith that glints in the sun for a moment. That’s all.

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 see the writer’s role as being different from any other artist’s. Our only job is to say, “Here, look at this (i.e. try using your brain this way) and see what happens.” If society doesn’t value that kind of action, it’s everyone’s loss.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve never really worked with an editor except once. It was incredible. I hope to have that experience again.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
You gotta let 'em breathe. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m actually working in both genres right now, but I’m finding it very difficult to balance them. I’d say the poetry project is suffering under the weight of the prose. Both have research components and I feel more pressure to get the essays “right.” They’re much more difficult for me to wrap my head around than poems. The essays are lyric, so they move like poems, but I also want them to function as “proofs.” That takes work.

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 sort of floating without a routine right now because I’m in grad school and it’s hard to settle into something. Previously, though, I have tried to free-write by hand for at least 20 minutes per day. That’s what I aspire to.

My day? Typically if I don’t have anywhere to go, I’ll sit in my backyard and eat breakfast and read for a few hours in the sun. But most mornings I hop on my bike for my commute down the beach, around the lake. It’s lovely, but far too fucking early. I try not to think about it.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I work with some found material and do an erasure or something. Or maybe switch genres. Or just screw it and take a walk on the beach.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Indoor: sautéing garlic. Outdoor: freshwater (stream, lake, river) with a bit of funk.

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?
Maps, urban planning diagrams, postcards, old etchings, old photographs, blueprints. I like working with collage, and I’m teaching myself how to alter books. It’s important to play in another medium.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a history buff and most of my writing incorporates research, so I read a lot of American history, urban history, architectural treatises, vintage advertising, etc. It’s extremely difficult for me to read a text in one of these subject areas without being compelled to incorporate it into my writing—in other words, to draw a line between satiating my curiosity and creating new stuff. It’s maddening, trying to figure out how to live.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I wish I could clone myself and have one me that does real adult things like raising children and cooking decent meals on a non-sporadic basis, and another me that reads and writes. And I’d like to learn to speak Dutch. Not sure which clone would get that assignment.

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?
My original plan was to work in museums. Museums were always my favorite places in the world as a child, and I majored in art history. I wanted to be a museum educator or a curator. I broke that off when I realized I hated the culture of the field. I’m not a good schmoozer because I’m far too blunt, and I’m not a good teacher, either. I’m terrible with kids. But I used to work in community arts education as an administrator, and I would love to get back into that. It still makes me want to cry when I think about kids making art.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m actually not opposed to doing something else. I think the “something else” is actually what allows the writing to happen. I wrote my book while I was waiting tables at a Chili’s in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I wouldn’t change a thing about that year. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York; the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Poetry-wise: a book about women in rural contexts, partially made with found language from farmwives’ magazines of the 1910s and ’20s. Nonfictionally: a series of linked essays about the Hudson River Valley, 9/11, John Jacob Astor IV, and first love. You had to be there.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Endi Bogue Hartigan, POOL [5 CHORUSES]

My short review of Endi Bogue Hartigan's POOL [5 CHORUSES] (Omnidawn, 2014) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

Natalie Simpson, Thrum

Home is small bills. Packing 99 square feet.

Shale tight.      Shale slid.

            Eyelids by day.

And day all equations.

Equatorial new guinea, old soft shoe. Who bids?

            Why not try sampling?

These days are harpy. (“Echo Localial”)

Calgary poet and lawyer Natalie Simpson’s remarkable second trade poetry collection is Thrum (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014), following on the heels of her accrete or crumble (Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2006). Her poems accumulate in quick rolls, composing line-fragments into a collage of meaning, linguistic purpose and rolling, luscious sound and spark. As she writes in the poem “Sentencing,” close to the beginning of the collection: “Wings would shudder. // Arisen single syncopate. / Single single syncopate.” There is an Olympic-sized twirl, twist and precision to her language, more nimble than the taut gymnastics by Toronto poet Marcus McCann, and more open to the possibilities of lyric and narrative flow than the works of Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk. The opening stanza of the poem “Vallarta,” towards the beginning of the third section, “Jack State,” suggests, possibly, a statement of purpose for her entire craft:

Terrible moments, these. Nothing to do

and must write. Pelicans swim the sea

and please. The land is a light and

falters. Flickers. False as old fortuna this

problem of poetry.

It is as though her poems are stripped of nearly everything except language itself, pointing off into an endless series of directions, all working to answer, as she suggests, “this problem of poetry.” Through the pulse and strum and boom of the rhythms that make up her Thrum, Simpson shows just what writing can make possible. As she writes in the second section, the poem/section “Echo Localial”: “Thrum sticks firm into firm place. Subordinate rhythm save reason. / Laid face to face.” Certainly, hers is a movement that doesn’t abandon meaning entirely (which arguably would be impossible, given the fact that her poems are still composed out of words placed side-by-side), but one that isn’t composed with any kind of straightforward meaning as its main purpose. She writes collage and sound, allowing the words to do, themselves, whatever they might, pinpointing her collage of sketch-poems point by point by point. Even before the book begins (according to the page numbers), she begins with this untitled fragment:

The poem trails the typing hand. The hand creases and clatters. The fingers jumble twitching. The poem defies corrosion. The hand defiles the poem. The poem clothes the hand.

new from above/ground press: Moritz, Harris, Tokar + Gordon,

Many forms in water / Rachel Moritz / $4
See link here for more information

LIKE / Sharon Harris / $4
See link here for more information

ARRHYTHMIA / Janice Tokar / $4
See link here for more information

Fifteen Problems / Noah Eli Gordon / Images by Sommer Browning / $4
See link here for more information



keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April-June 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

and did you see what we made in March/April? February? January?

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Also available: Touch the Donkey #1!

Eleni Sikelianos, You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)

I want to say: this is a tale of redemption. But it isn’t.

But it is.

When I wrote the book about my junkie father, the stories moved out of me.

Now, where will the cat girl’s daughter’s stories go?

American poet Eleni Sikelianos’ new creative non-fiction memoir is You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2014). The author of seven trade poetry collections, including a “hybrid memoir,” The Book of Jon (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2004) that she composed on her late father, this new book focuses on the complicated life of her maternal grandmother, Melena, who married five times, had three children, was an infamous burlesque dancer, and rewrote her life constantly to suit her purposes and situation. Existing in a lost space, Sikelianos’ memoir works to reclaim an incomplete story, attempting to excavate, explore and articulate what had been lost, forgotten and even deliberately hidden. Writing of her grandmother as “the toughest, hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bit nails,” Sikelianos is the archaeologist seeking to connect the fragments of an impossible map, and yet she is fortunate enough to have an enormous amount of information on her late grandmother’s life, from multiple stories passed down from various family members, to an array of posters, fliers and clippings of Helena’s life in burlesque, a number of which are reproduced in the book. The book even includes an appendix at the end, allowing two of Melena’s three daughters to “respond to the book about their mother,” allowing Sikelianos’ version of Melena to not automatically overpower and even replace any other possible versions.

While my grandmother’s paternal great-grandfather was making millions in ragpicking, dime museums filled with taxidermy, gambling devices, human freaks, and lady dancers kicking up their heels in the back were paving the road to my grandmother and her burlesque.

What speaks to me is the curl of her foot. Our spiritual guides are beautiful women in sequined halter tops who teach us how to have a good time. Under the Salomé veil is the divinity of sex. Belly, breasts, waist, thighs, hands, neck, the angle of her head is a question, the question mark an invitation. There is something hiding in the shadow between shoulder and clavicle: dark, the father, the closet. Her eyes are angled toward the corridor from which someone will enter. Something is tangled up between this life and the next. She is urging him to get up and come to her (but not unless it’s after the show and he’s willing to pay). You don’t get to touch. Harry, you get to think of touching the soft skin of the inner thigh: it’s a contract between her and the forty men in the smoke-filled room. The hip slides in lazy circles, flesh moving gently over the bone: all of the Orient between her hips, a small sea of inviting flesh. What is she thinking of? The man who wants to touch her? The wad of bills she has to give to the club owner, the mobsters, the cops? Have her kids eaten dinner? Something more brooding, some black cloud over the brain? The men at the bar drink until they love everybody or fight. This is the story of what slides between the Leopard Girl and the men watching her. This is a miniature history of the way women are watched.

Someone said, it is not pornography until there is no more expression of particulars. When the details of the woman dancing under the lights—the elegance of her leopard’s hand, her curling fingers, the arch of her foot—are lost. (The leopard loses its hunger—its true animal nature—the moment I crop it to one eye and an ear.) Dora Vivacqua, la Luz del Fuego, the naked snake dancer, was assassinated by a religious fanatic at her nudist colony (a little island on which only the unclothed were allowed) in 1967. Perhaps it was the end of burlesque.

A book of outcasts, Sikelianos’ poetic memoir is a remarkable exploration of personal history, the fluid nature of identity, and the impossibility of knowing everything about anyone, especially someone as complicated, changing and deliberately slippery as Sikelianos’ grandmother, Melena. Writing such a book on a straightforward character would be difficult enough, and Melena certainly didn’t make such a thing easy, almost allowing for the fluid approach Sikelianos takes, moving across and through her material, as much the patient and detailed archivist as the granddaughter who simply knows some questions might never be answered properly. Through You Animal Machine, Sikelianos’ archival quest for family comprehension is reminiscent of some of the work of Susan Howe, such as the prose sections of That This (New Directions, 2010), or Alberta poet Monica Kidd’s memoir Any Other Woman (NeWest Press, 2008). As powerful as The Book of Jon was, You Animal Machine is a far stronger, and more complex work, one that plays with the form of the lyric memoir, and manages to provide a deeply compelling portrait of a feisty, fiery woman who lived fully and without apology, and rewrote herself constantly for the shifts in her situation. Just who was this woman, once known as “Melena the Leopard Girl”?

What does it mean to be a wife?

A wife of what?

It just didn’t work out for her.

Did she iron the little man’s shirt, do the thug’s laundry after a heist, housework for the Jew? What is the sexual body when put in the spotlight, when put in the shade of a house?

Did she kiss the little man in the morning? Or grumble about the coffee, hoping he would take care of her, bring her coffee in bed? But it didn’t turn out like that; or it did but it didn’t please her in the way she had hoped

Five husbands. Five households, five apartments, five bodies, five fingers, five lives five frying pans with which to smack them over the head.

I’m trying to make sense for her, build her a net that connects to everything, let her slide around in an elegant way in daylight.

poets touching trees interview : rob mclennan,

I answer some questions about touching trees as part of the "poets touching trees" blog. It even includes a photo of me touching the tree in our new Alta Vista Drive front yard (much to my frustration, I couldn't find any photos of me on the homestead as a tree-touching youth). Check out prior interviews (and tree-touching photos) with kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Andrea Rexilius, Bianca Stone, Elizabeth Clark Wessel and a whole slew of others.

Literary mothers: rob mclennan on Elizabeth Smart

My short essay, "Literary mothers: rob mclennan on Elizabeth Smart," is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brecken Hancock

Brecken Hancock’s poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Lemon Hound, The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is Reviews Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Interviews Editor for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Her first book of poems, Broom Broom, is out with Coach House Books. She lives in Ottawa.

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?
Publishing my first book has been exhilarating. Coach House was my first choice of publisher and I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the experience of publishing with them. Sometimes I bike to work along the river and the air smells sweeter for having accomplished something that it took a long time to bring to fruition.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It began with infatuation. I didn’t really know anything about poetry when I was a teenager, but I wanted to. I longed to draw nearer to it. I started scribbling things that I thought were profound. They weren’t. I kept trying. Although I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction and non-fiction, it was the poetry I was reading that made me want to look for ways to make my poems work. Maybe it’s the versatility of poetry—its shape-shifting, mellifluous ways? Wow. And who doesn’t love rhymes?

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?
Writing is slow and I’m not prolific. I revise and revise and revise. In my experience, first thoughts are not best thoughts, and I push myself past the first sting of “Ah! A snag in language” to something that brings me closer to the hidden nub of the wound.

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?
For Broom Broom I always knew I was working on a book-length project—although I tried, however unsuccessfully, to work on the individual pieces as discretely from one another as possible. But in the end, each poem had to serve the larger whole or it was cut. The pieces I’m working on now feel different. I don’t have a particular story I’m trying to tell. I’m having much fun with a proliferation of ideas and at this early stage—I love the fact that I have no idea where the new work will lead. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Reading out loud, even at home by myself, fuels my approach whether I’m writing in form, rhyme, or prose. Poetry’s versatility to be both page-bound and ephemerally voiced means that it’s a uniquely liminal genre—somewhere between prose and music, sometimes closer to one or the other. Public readings can feel like a guilty pleasure away from the cavern of production. Oh, yes! This is work too. I’m an extrovert—I love talking to other writers, hearing from other writers, discussing, drinking, joking, staying up late. Sometimes when I’m alone at my computer, I’m dreaming of a time when I’ll have a chance to share the work, to have that ideal experience of connecting with an audience, to feel the words filling up a room.

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?
This is a complicated question for me and one that I’ve thought a lot about recently. Broom Broom deals explicitly with issues of domestic horror and crises of identity—when the home/self becomes “unhomey,” the uncanny. I wrote extensively about the impetus behind the book in a recent essay for Seventeen Seconds, which, if readers are interested, they can find here: http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds/pdfs/ninthissue.pdf

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 even know how to be a decent human, let alone how to provide advice about what a writer should be up to in the larger culture. Thinking about what it means to be alive is really hard, really painful, I find. I often feel like a scarecrow, stuffed with straw, propped up in my privilege—surveying my “situation” in life. It’s a feeling of a lack of agency. I could say that the power that comes from my privilege is a gift that I can use to make a difference in the world—it’s power that shouldn’t be squandered. But most of the time I’m the one swimming in my own luck and enjoying the luxuries that the colour of my skin and my socio-economic class afford me. I could say, “a writer should be informed and try to do what’s best based on the evidence.” But what does that mean? I know about the oil sands and I still drive a car, still fly on an airplane. Things are troubling and I feel entirely culpable. And I feel trapped in my culpability.

Then we can consider what it means to be a good friend and a trusted loved one. I said something mean about my husband in public recently. I meant it to be funny and it came out entirely wrong. I still think about that. Why does being in this body and brain require my making so many mistakes? Friends are breaking up. Friends’ parents are ill. How can I help? I think it’s so easy to feel despair on both political and personal levels. Writing can’t fix this for me. I can talk about these feelings of inadequacy in my writing, but think there’s a ceiling on what writing can do.

I’ve maybe taken my answer to your question past the point of reason. I’m actually, generally, a happy and grateful person. But nagging questions about responsibility and culpability won’t be defeated easily. You’ve hit a nerve here and I spend a lot of my time stewing in the evils that my way of life ushers into the world. The earth is heating up. The power of storms and lack of resources is what I believe will ultimately prompt systemic action.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s hard to jump from the gravity of that last question to this one about process, but here goes: working with an editor is absolutely essential for me. Everything happens in the revision process. I try to act as an outsider to my own work, as much as that is possible, and have learned how to view my work from across the room, so to speak, by paying close attention to how my trusted friends interact with the poems. I’m always poking at the line, tweaking, massaging.

Susan Holbrook was a wonderful editor for Broom Broom; she has a keen ear and eye. In the daily life of my poetry-writing process, I rely on friends Stewart Cole and Jeramy Dodds—we share work, e-mail back and forth, talk on the phone. Pascale McCullough Manning read Broom Broom many times before it went to press—in the early days of getting the book ready, I remember Skyping with her and she had the pages printed out and arranged across her floor. Friendships like these are humbling and necessary. My world would be so much smaller without them. And my husband, Andrew Markle, is always my first reader and sounding board. He’s a fiction writer, so he brings an entirely new perspective to the work. When something is off for him, it’s an early warning sign to go back and re-think.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Never give unsolicited advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Poetic critical prose is something I’ve only just started to try my hand at. I used to be a PhD student in English literature and I published a couple of academic articles back in that life—but the poetic essays I’m working on now feel entirely different. I enjoy the challenge.

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 have a 9-5 job that dictates what’s possible in terms of writing time. I try to write in the mornings before heading to my job, but I’m not a morning person and progress isn’t stellar. Mornings tend to be best for editing my work, or for making progress on volunteer projects, like editing Arc reviews or preparing for CWILA interviews.

Weekends are essential and my husband and I go to a particular coffee shop that we love to work in and stay for hours every Saturday and Sunday. All my vacation time from my paying job is spent writing, which means I haven’t had any real time off for a few years. We even spent our honeymoon writing at a cottage in Vermont—that’s actually how I finished Broom Broom.

I’ve been lucky though because in the past I’ve had long periods of time away from paying work due to a couple of Canada Council grants and a Saskatchewan Arts Board grant. The bulk of Broom Broom was written while I was able to write full time. That was blissful. I would wake up, have an elaborate breakfast, read poetry in the sun, walk, ride my bike, and use all of that cat-like luxury to fuel my energy for poems.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I wouldn’t really say my writing is ever “stalled.” If writing isn’t progressing, it’s because I’m not working diligently enough. I don’t really believe in inspiration—or rather I believe that inspiration is everywhere. Of course reading is essential. And being out in the world looking at things. But the only way to really get anything done is to sit with my fingers on a keyboard and bang through the frustrations one-on-one with the page.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cedar.

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 friend, artist Kerri Reid, after reading some of my work about bathtubs, pointed me toward an episode of Art 21 featuring Janine Antoni, whose installation featuring a bathtub full of lard particularly arrested me. After that, I watched every episode of Art 21. So many of the artists talking about their work lent ideas to my poems. Oliver Herring, James Turrell, Sally Mann, Kara Walker, Cai Guo-Quiang, Jenny Holzer.

Oh, and I referenced a Ricky Gervais joke in one of my poems too. Stand up comedy has had an influence on me, although my poems aren’t as funny as I’d like them to be.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
While I was writing Broom Broom, I devoured memoirs and memoir-like texts: Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary; Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights; Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story; Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom; Lynn Crosbie’s Life is About Losing Everything; Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage; Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story; Patrick Lane’s There is a Season; Édouard Levé’s Suicide; David Wills’s Prosthesis; Kate Zambreno’s Heroines; Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water… I could go on but I’ll end there. I love the memoir form and it’s something I’ll keep returning to.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
BASE jumping. It’s a really bad idea, terrifically dangerous. But when I see videos of BASE jumpers, it looks like ultimate freedom to me. I love their squirrel suits. The super power I always choose is flight.

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 think a lot of professions look exciting from afar. Sometimes, even now, I think about going back to school to become a psychologist.

It would be disingenuous of me, however, to call my writing an “occupation”—in that it’s not the principal means by which I earn my living. I’m a business owner, an editor, and a full-time employee at a job where I contribute to public policy. Writing is a career and it’s part of my everyday life, my everyday work, but it’s by no means the only thing I do.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
If I think, specifically, about what made me write, what makes me write, it’s probably about agency. I was really young when I started writing, and at that time I felt alone and angry and silenced. I wanted to speak, even if it was just a voice that echoed back to myself. I started working with words and got hooked. After that, I didn’t really think about why any longer. It’s been over twenty years since I started jotting things down that I thought of as “poems” and only now do I have a first book out in the world. Something kept me going and it wasn’t only the thought of the eventual public presentation of my poems in book form.

I gathered with friends for food and walks a couple of weekends ago. We all work in different genres and forms of expression, from film to visual art to poetry to prose to the undefined. Each of us had stories about being discouraged by teachers and professors—that clichéd story “look to your right and to your left… only one of you will still be here in a few years.” We discussed at length how easy it actually turned out to be to work in the artistic fields—you just have to be flexible about what “working in your field” actually means. I work in my field but I don’t make a living at it. I’ve made peace with that.

And it’s the work of writing that’s always drawn me back. The actual work, words on a page, has been both the easy part and the hard part. It’s hard to keep going in a vacuum and it takes willpower and a sense of self that refuses to forgo expression. On the other hand it’s easy to be a poet: all you have to do is write poetry.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
At the lake this past weekend, I jumped into the water naked after finishing Aisha Sasha John’s Thou.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished editing Jeramy Dodds’s translation of the Poetic Edda—a vivid, brilliant version of the Old Norse poems, out with Coach House this summer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

David W. McFadden, Shouting Your Name Down The Well

My review of Toronto writer David W. McFadden's new collection of tanka and haiku, Shouting Your Name Down The Well (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2014) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

Gary Barwin, moon baboon canoe

inside

inside Stephen Harper

there’s a little dog

inside the dog

another dog

inside this dog

it’s Stephen Harper

and inside him

a still smaller dog

in a Stephen Harper mask

(kidding, it’s really Stephen Harper)

it’s Stephen Harper

all the way down

Stephen Harper

why do you make things so small?

Hamilton, Ontario writer, performer and composer Gary Barwin’s follow-up to his poetry collection The Porcupinity of the Stars (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2010) [see my review of such here] is moon baboon canoe (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2014). The poems collected here are softer, more subtle than the poems in the previous collection, and more striking for their silences, whether in the final lines of the poem “inside,” or the end of the first poem in the sequence “seedpod microfiche” (a sequence which appeared previously as a chapbook through above/ground press) that reads: “there is, my love, / a stethoscope whose end / is nowhere / whose earpieces / are everywhere [.]” It is as though the force of the writing comes through specifically because of the quieter, more subtle voice he engages within this collection, and we can’t help but lean in to hear.

moon baboon canoe

a baboon rents a canoe

then smashes into the moon

fragments of moon, baboon, canoe

rain down

as you breathe your lungs fill with

moon, baboon, canoe

moon, baboon, canoe

inside each breath

people who I love, you say

people about whom I care

moon, baboon, canoe

moon, shoelace, canoe

baboon

baboon

I’ve long considered the best of Barwin’s work to include an intriguing blend of the work of Canadian poets Stuart Ross and David W. McFadden, and perhaps that idea is more true than I might have considered, given the deep and quick intimacy his poems allow, mixed with observational humour, deceptively simple language, the occasional large concept and side-step into surrealism. Barwin’s poems also manage to do that most difficult of things: to bring entirely new perspectives to what is completely familiar. As he writes to open the poem “push and pull”: “the accordion flies aloft / it cannot rise // the accordion has nothing / neither locks nor teeth // it seizes the world / is imprisoned // it does not escape / does not live or die[.]” With this, one might suggest that Barwin’s poems are big enough to encompass and include the entire world.