Michael Turner, Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

 

Everything I think I am beginning is already in motion and never ends. An infinite middle that “begins” with my periodic need of origins.

This book has its beginnings. One of them came in the fall of 2019, when I was on hold waiting to speak to my cable provider. The song playing was the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Another came in 1979, when Debbie, mark, Phil and I began spending after-hours at the Avenue Grill. Each booth had its own jukebox, and we fed ours regularly, colouring our world with song.

A third came ten years before that, in 1969, captured in a long-lost Polaroid of my mother, my sister and me standing uncomfortably around our piano while my father led us in a sing-a-long. On top of the piano was a cloth-bound book called A Treasury of Our Best-Loved Songs.

The latest from Vancouver writer, poet and musician Michael Turner is Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2024), a collection that follows multiple poetry and prose titles across thirty-plus years that play with genre, music and narrative layerings, from the infamous Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993)—the only Canadian poetry title adapted into a feature-length film—Kingsway (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), American Whiskey Bar (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), The Pornographer’s Poem (Toronto ON: Doubleday, 1999) and the most recent 9x11 (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018) [see my review of such here]. As the back cover of this new collection offers: “Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introduction and ends with the songs – or in this instance, poems – to which they refer. Though these poems aren’t expressly critical, their formal method of construction qualifies them as that subgenre of poetry known as the protest poem.”

Turner has long been engaged with the the hows of narrative, offering book-length twists, blending working-class first-person commentaries into the lyric, or a book-length poem as long as a particular city street. There are threads here that run through the length and breadth of Turner’s work, from an interest in genre, working class flexibilities, autofiction, tour notes, rock ‘n’ roll songbooks, the lyric sentence and the straighter lyric, and the dual-aspect of commentary and poem in Playlist provides an inverse kind of call-and-response to the pieces. It is almost a reversal of the poem-and-response of Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (McClelland and Stewart, 1978), or even Ken Norris’ COMMENTARIES (above/ground press, 1999), his chapbook-length prose poem response to his own full-length collection, The Music (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1995). Turner offers a story, and a song; another story, and another song. Sometimes the story is directly tied to the song that follows, but often it is not, allowing for a series of suggested links. There something of the folk-crooner, the work poet, through these pages. If Peter Culley (1958-2015) wrote songs, or if Gordon Lightfoot (1938-2023) composed poetry titles, Michael Turner’s Playlist lands somewhere between, perhaps.

I was seven when my mother enrolled me in piano lessons. Mrs. Sather was a nervous widow in her late-sixties who lived across the park in a magazine clean house with a blind Boston Terrier. It was fun at first – Mrs. Sather’s piano was brighter than ours, its action quicker. But after a year of scales I lost interest. Plus I didn’t like the way her dog looked at me.

I return to music in my early teens, first with the mandolin, which I found in a junk shop my father liked to visit and taught myself to play. After that, the guitar, especially the folkier aspects of bands my friends and I were listening to – the music of T. Rex, David Bowie and Led Zeppelin.

There were others in my grade who played musical instruments. Phil was already accomplished on trumpet and guitar, and I marvelled at how he could listen to any song and figure out its chords and solo by ear. Mark also played guitar and sang well enough to turn the words of songs I was familiar with into moods that I was not.

Eventually Phil and Mark and others would gather with their amps, drums and keyboards to jam in Phil’s basement. But while they were rocking out on Zappa fragments, flirting with jazz fusion, I sat on the edge of my bed reading bluegrass tabs, or trying to get my hands around the songs of Melanie Safka, Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading and Kate Bush.

torrin a. greathouse, DEED

 

I Am Beginning to Mistake
the Locust’s Song for Silence

Night is lonely as unplucked
guitar strings. Desire: blue
hum of a phone screen making
neon from my skin’s damp spread.
Ugly music of two bodies
rapt in the performance of lust.
Dance choreographed for a third
party’s pleasure. The screen freezes
&, for a moment, pixelates cum
to flake of off-white snow.
A mattress can be a kind of desert.
Mine, a drought—
40 days without softness.
My palm makes the sound
of a thirsty mouth. I’m jealous
of crickets, for how they turn
friction to song.

From self-described Washington State-based “transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist” torrin a. greathouse comes the poetry collection DEED (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), following on the heels of her full-length debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (2020). DEED is a collection of poems on physicality; writing the body—the queer body, the transgender body, the disabled body—through a lens of resistance, limitation, comfort, discomfort, gender and sex. “The truth of most words / is the bloody they leave behind.” she writes, to open the poem “While Researching the Etymology of Punk, / I Discover a Creation Myth Stitched into the Liner Notes,” “Every name I’ve given myself— // a kind of injury.” There is an expansiveness that burns through this collection, moving through elements of burst text and erasure, expressive gestures and a precise, lyric ferocity. “There’s a certain economics // to the way I let them fuck me / as if I were a man. My body more / valuable as anything it’s not. I cut // my hair short,” she writes, as part of the extended lyric sequence, “I Want to Write an Honest Poem About Desire,” “then buried—for years—any hope of a future / girl. Call it backpassing. Cost / -benefit analysis. Safety feature. / I was closeted at every job. After all, / nowhere is safe for girls like me.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Clare Goulet

Clare Goulet is a British-Québécoise hybrid raised in Nova Scotia. Essays, fiction, reviews, and poems have been published in journals and books in Canada and abroad including The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Dalhousie Review, TAR, Collateral, and Listening to the Heartbeat of Being (MQUP). With Mark Dickinson, she co-edited the anthology Lyric Ecology (Cormorant) on the work of Jan Zwicky; she's given papers for various scholarly associations on metaphor in science, polyphony, manuscript editing, machine-generated poems, and writing pedagogy. Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau) was released May 2024. She lives a few steps from woods and ocean at the edge of Halifax, where she teaches and directs the Writing Centre at MSVU.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Graphis scripta snuck up between an anthology of essays on Jan Zwicky, far behind me, and a novel just ahead: between those slower, thicker books, this one deked through like a breakaway kid chasing the puck for the slapshot & through sheer luck landing it. After decades collecting lichen and slow walks, plus a daily whirl of work and parenting, the book itself happened fast—had to—and was a sneaky joy to make.  I thought that would be the end, didn’t realize that a book can generate its own life once it’s out, and now it’s me chasing after it—readings in unexpected places, lichen walks, scientists getting in touch about poetry, connecting with ecopoets in other countries, new projects. New life.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Oh I’ve written all three always – particularly essays about metaphor and science and looking, and small fiction-poetry hybrids, and I can feel fiction for better or worse tugging at some of these poems – the 2 boys of Hypogymnia (H in the Index of names, power-headed tube lichen) —they popped out of nowhere as main characters and took over with plastic 80s tampon applicators flapping on their fingers.  And Acharius in his garden bent over specimens, and the pre-war northern British street kids of hammered shield lichen.  Fortunately the whole point of the Index was, in a way, to character-ize lichen, unpack the metaphoric names.  Way back when I was agonizing over genre as you do in your 20s, Don McKay penciled a marginal quip: “Poetry has always had the hots for prose, and vice versa. As lovers they are much more interesting than as categories.” It’s still pinned to my wall. The novel ahead, allegedly fiction, has a prose-poem and non-fiction threads running alongside the story—so perhaps I’ve found the form for me at last!

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?

A quick idea—seeing it all in a flash —then slow and painful and dread and masses of overthinking—then (usually, though not with this book) forcing myself to the table, until the relief of revision. But this one was fun—an idea sketched in 2010 on the back of an envelope, then I raised a kid, then found the envelope in the pandemic and went for it.

I was heartened by Joel Plaskett’s song-a-week project and built weekly deadlines for 26 pieces into its Canada Council Research & Creation grant, and made the game-changing rule for myself that writing had to happen alongside the research, not after. To always be writing, to have the thing always cooking on the front burner. Thank god for that and for Pavia café in Herring Cove and its excellent window ledge for scribbling those first drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I write lots of one-offs in the moment, most in my drawer, be glad, but I love reading books with a tiny focus—could be structural, thematic, conceptual—as they tend to take you everywhere, and that’s what happened here.  After a couple of early lichen poems and essays on metaphor, the idea of a science-art poetic field guide with an Index of Names came at once, sketched, grounded in walks for local species, after years of silent looking.  Graphis scripta was always a book.

As for the poems themselves – most begin with looking and a phrase that arrives unbidden —like a line of music—the notes and the vibe all there – and for me the work is to see if there’s more there, a whole song.  Often what comes first is an end that I then write towards (chasing after the puck again). What to me are the four or five truest poems in the book arrived entire like that, whole, one draft, it was like taking dictation. Elf-ear, mushroom, the diva Cladonia, a couple others. Maybe some writers can access that sphere often or easily or all the time. I’m not there yet!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m more used to creating and hosting and organizing and applauding other writers at readings; I prefer to be offstage and tend to disappear if a camera’s pulled out. But I know that public readings and hearing poems in the moment, together,  matters, and so far they’ve each been unexpectedly fun, particularly with this book. I’m so passionate about lichen that it overrides shyness, people ask hard, fantastic questions, and it’s the poems out there, not me.  Maybe improper, but I discovered that readings (and Brian Bartlett says it’s ok!) are where you can keep revising your poems after publication or try out different versions—I’ve rarely read a poem exactly as published in the book.  Taking different ones out for a spin, or in different combinations for different venues—mini-curating—is also fun and changes my own perception of what I thought I knew.  

Readings underscore how place matters:  I’m half British, and some poems have turns of phrase that worked fully only in Ireland and the UK, whereas other poems  couldn’t go over at all! (When writer Clare Pollard was looking at a couple in revision, I had to explain a ‘cakewalk’—which by the way sounds super-odd as a custom to non-initiates). Here in Halifax local audiences know the landscape at Herring Cove so I can’t get away with bullshit. Last month, reading pieces on 1810 Irish botanist Ellen Hutchins in her landscape of West Cork, Ireland to her family descendants became suddenly high-stakes – I felt a responsibility of care that probably should always be there.

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?

John Berger famously switched from painting to writing to meet his own particular 20^th-century moment. Here in the 21^st, at this tipping point, I’m not sure that writing meets the current questions.   I do seem to trace over the same concerns; failure of language, failure to connect, seeing and mis-seeing things as they are.   

In this case I wanted to read a field guide to lichen that explored the nature of metaphor and couldn’t find one, so I wrote one. At one stage it had a Preface for the concept, deleted last minute: Metaphor and lichen each about two or more wholes sharing the same space; lichen isn’t a plant, it’s a relationship, alliance of fungus and at least one photosynthetic partner (alga, cyanobacterium)—as well as other elements we’re only beginning to see.  A metaphor, too, associates one thing with another: something is like but not the same as, not literally, something else, changing our minds in ways that we’re just beginning to understand. The main move is that in a metaphor, as in a lichen, each partner remains whole, yet their conjunction creates something that wasn’t there before. I gave a talk in 2006 on this and encountered the analogy twice since, Don McKay in an essay and Brenda Hillman in a recent interview (so hey it must be true!). We each saw different points of congruity, took different paths to the same clearing.   

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Oh god, I remember interviewing Karen Connelly back in the ’90s – she was just back to Canada from Greece and Thailand and  had an articulate impassioned despairing rant on the lack of role in the culture, here in Canada, compared to elsewhere, back in that golden era when something like the state of writing seemed like a serious problem. 

I do think—for any art—stitching together disparate fragments into a piece of wholecloth of some kind—integrating what appears separate, illuminating a relationship of this to that, connecting—is of immense value at a time when other interests seek to break us apart and see us as pieces more than wholes, for the purpose of control.  I think this kind of art-making of whole paintings, poems, books, jokes, photographs, bread loaves etc is of value not only (or even primarily) for the culture but for the person doing it, the maker. Whole persons can make whole cultures that are resistant and resilient to forces of destruction and control. Putin and his Kremlin cohort know this: there’s a reason missiles are targeting theatres, libraries, schools, galleries, and cafés where influential writers like Victoria Amelina were known to congregate. Ukrainians know this and rescued books when the Dnipro dam broke, drying  them page by page in the sun. The last thing Maksym Kryvtsov did the day before he was killed defending Ukraine from invasion—expecting he might be killed—was to write a poem in the company of his cat. You can read it here.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential and wildly enjoyable—putting a book out means to me the poems have to aim to work for others, as a hospitable gesture, to point and look with someone at something, together.  But as a working parent-writer of a younger child For this book, it was impossible to access the standard Banff editorial programs  that glimmered and beckoned; like many parents, I couldn’t at the time turn the key and leave for a month, or stop working. Thankfully Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau gave a lucid sensitive read, plus time, and I invented an editorial development project with a UK writer for a half-dozen poems over Zoom, with the Canada Council’s professional development grant and the brilliant Clare Pollard.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Margaret Laurence, in an interview with her I found when I was 16: “You’d be a fool to be an optimist in this world. But you gotta have hope.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Over a life I’m noticing the reverse direction—critical prose to poetry—though I still flip back and forth. I used to love the flip and how each fed the other, but now, moving into  complex stories I can feel myself wanting to leave analysis behind—having a bit of a break-up with it. It hogged the mic for way too long.

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?

The day begins with the dog needing something, continues with the dog and amazing child needing something, then my wonderful students, returns to the dog and family, and in between I write. For anything complex, I use long stretches pre-dawn before the dog or the world is awake.  (The dog has a great routine though; too bad he doesn’t write.) 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I take the problem into the woods and walk a circular trail and let my brain solve it sideways, without trying to. Or just embrace the stall and sit in granite cliffs by the Atlantic, big ocean, and aim to be empty of words—to let language, to quote Don, “fray back into air” and just breathe.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Coal.  It conjures 1970s Staffordshire where I lived with my grandmother and went to school briefly as a child – coal in the grate to heat the tiny house, coaldust in the bricks, in the air, in your mouth. Here in Nova Scotia it’s the stink of seaweed at low tide: it fills you.

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?

Yeah this book feels built from and for a lifetime of books, in a way. Other art forms? Music!  Virginia Woolf once said she always conceived of her books as music before she wrote them. I think certain pieces of music can respond to and also shape the rhythms of what you write, or offer complex polyphonic structures that help you build other complex structures. The novel to come has one thread that’s entirely music, a score composed for and built into the story. Without music how can you articulate loss?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Fairy tales and Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and the 1986 reprint of Eli Mandel’s Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970—one of those 5-dollar McClelland & Stewart NCL paperbacks. In college Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy changed my life in the full Rilkean sense. Don McKay’s “Baler Twine,” ditto, and not only his essays and poems (Birding, Or Desire and Apparatus and Vis à Vis and Paradoxides) but the marginalia, jazz collection, postcards, quips and asides, with Don it’s all gold and of a piece. Sue Sinclair, Elizabeth Hay, Anne Simpson, Helen Humphreys. Ilya Kaminsky. In the UK Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage speak to my north-midland English soul, as does Kate Atkinson, whose stories somehow permit serious fun.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Write a mystery. It’s inescapable, like cultural genetic code. See: Atkinson, above.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?

It was hands down a cello-playing marine biologist for saltwater plants until I realized there was such a thing as a lichenologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Probably lack of ability to do something else. I read and wrote freakishly early so I have no memory of learning to do them, or of not doing them; it’s a hard question to answer as there was never in memory a ‘before’ books time.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Film: the slow intense Banel & Adama by Ramata-Toulaye Sy, with my daughter over the summer, and watching her watch it.  Great pleasure books are always for my greatly pleasurable book-club, currently Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Speedboat, a wild 1976 novel by Renata Adler, and I’m behind on both. For poems a recent slip of a thing that lingered is Slant Light by Sarah Westcott.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Fiction and poetry at the same time, god help me! Small steps into a new thing, Loan Words, more language stuff, and a long poem/recording, Subliminal, using 1810 letters of an Irish botanist from the other side of the Atlantic, which forever pulls. Basically whatever I can make at dawn before the rest of the house wakes up.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

poems, essays, interviews, chapbooks + upcoming readings: Toronto, Kingston, Calgary etc;

In case you hadn't seen, I was interviewed recently by Ivy Grimes, for her clever substack. She’s interviewed a whole ton of folk over there, so be sure to check out her archives. And you saw that Stan Rogal interviewed me for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, and Cara Waterfall interviewed me for her substack as well, yes? I had a recent poem up at Amsterdam Review, and a section of “the green notebook” up at Annulet, with another section up recently at Eunoia Review. Did you see all the Canadian books I recommended recently over at 49th Shelf? I also have a poem in Allium, A Journal of Poetry and Prose. My new short story collection, On Beauty, was also featured not long ago over at the Creative Writing at Leicester site. I should probably be sending more work out, but there’s been less of that lately, between my attentions around the works-in-progress “the green notebook” and “the genealogy book.” I’m hoping once at least one of those projects is off my plate I can start focusing again on poems again, as well as that novel-in-progress I keep referencing (some of which furthers threads from On Beauty, by the way). I also keep forgetting to tell you about chapbooks I've had out recently, including Retreat journal: (Montreal: Turret House Press, 2024), : condition report (Toronto: Gap Riot Press, 2024) and the great silence of the poetic line (Banff: No Press, 2024). Support those presses! Order things! Although if you were following either my enormously clever substack or my ongoing Patreon, you would have already known about these items (it is a lot to update all of these systems, you know).

Oh, and did you hear I’m going to be interviewed by Alan Neal for CBC Radio Ottawa’s All In A Day on Tuesday afternoon? We’re taping around 2pm due to my schedule collecting our wee monsters from school, so I don’t know yet what time my segment will air. The show runs from 3-6pm EDT, so you can attempt to catch live, or check the website after to catch it recorded.

Christine is reading in Toronto on Monday night, as part of the Book*hug Press launch, and in Hamilton on Thursday, November 7, as part of a further Book*hug launch, which has me a few days solo with our young ladies, which is fine. I’m also heading out Toronto way on Friday morning, as Christine and I will meet up for an event I’m part of on Dundas Street West on Friday, November 8, reading to help launch a small handful of new letterpress items published by someone editions (including something of mine) (I’ll also have a handful of copies of my short story collection on hand, if you want a copy). Christine even has a clever graphic she made up with all of her events, some of which I’m part of, even. Oh, and Christine and I read in Kingston on Sunday, November 17 with Alison Chisholm at the Drift/Line Series, which I’m looking forward to, lovingly hosted by poet Wanda Praamsma. Do you know her work?

And then there's our reading later this month in Calgary, also, via Single Onion, November 21. There are also plans afoot for Christine and I to read in Vancouver in February, but nothing yet is confirmed.