Monday, August 31, 2015
Roy Kiyooka, a web folio : The Capilano Review
Sunday, August 30, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Buck Downs
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I've had something like four or five first books, it seems like -- the first of many self-published chapbooks/books, the first livre d'artist hand set in real lead type, the first full-length book, the first full-length book where I did not have to chip in on the printer's bill.
I think they were each supposed to change my life, and they did so, mostly by letting me shelf the old work and focus on the next thing.
I always think of my work as a dynamically-evolving enterprise, fearlessly moving forward, but I suspect that it actually has not changed much in the last 20 years, other than a measurable reduction in the frequency of swear words.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Too lazy to be a novelist, too scared of people to be a playwright. And a genuine lack of curiosity about other people ruled out journalism.
So poetry slipped in more or less just when I needed it, and provided traction for a creative impulse that was spinning its wheels.
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?
Starting is not really an issue. I can start (in my head) ten writing projects a day. How long does it take to get one finished?
The work that I am finishing at any given time is based on notes that I took 2-3 years previously. I am always working, and failing, to resolve a backlog, to catch up.
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 pretty much always group my poems into fascicles and folders and books. Since the postcard is the central instance of my ongoing writing practice, individual poems are fairly short, i.e., postcard-sized. But they are each incremental additions to the dialectic of the codex.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
At the same time that I am or was the person I described in #2 above, I am also a ham and a pig for attention. So reading my poems is an activity that I still get excited to do.
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?
For example, how the poems look on the page is itself a statement about the nature of reality. I think anyone could hold a book of mine at arm's length, flip through the pages without reading, and understand the statement they see in the page design.
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?
So very cool to live in a polyvalent and democratic world, where there is no one role for anybody, but roles, stages, phases, too many for one life to hold.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I work as a freelance writer/editor, and I hear that I am helping out my clients. But my experience is that most poetry editors are too harried to give good feedback; yes and no are are about 9/13ths of all the editorial feedback I have gotten.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Print it out -- the trees will appreciate being included in your creative process. David Allen said that in a talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
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?
A pocket notebook is my daily companion. The workflow that metabolizes those notebooks is fairly labor-intensive, and much of it happens on subway trains/buses.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I cannot be bothered to worry about it. If the biggest problem you have today is you didn't write a poem, then things are going pretty good.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have found to my comical if pretentious chagrin that the bathroom in my house smells like the one in my grandmother's old house in Ellisville, Miss., where she and my uncle W.A. lived some 60-70 years.
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?
Really just living a life, yall. As I try to explain to myself the conceptual framework of the work, phrases from the business of recorded song, e.g., "demo tape", typically come up.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The DCPoetry.com crew has been keeping me entertained and busy for 20 years now; by extension the DC Arts Center has been an ongoing source of support.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Get done.
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?
Is poetry my occupation here? I feel like that's a little sad. I've had several jobs of different kinds, but I think I'm a little old to say, for example "I always wanted to be a chemist".
I never wanted to have any kind of job or occupation at all. Maybe that's why poetry, after all.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was fairly consistently encouraged by every kind of authority figure, parent, older person or peer to abandon poetry and/or writing throughout my school years. Probably defiance has been more of a motivating force than anything.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I am an annoying intellectual fake who delights in telling his peers that the cinema is the intellectual equivalent of paying a millionaire for the privilege of sucking his cock, no exceptions.
So yeah, no last great film for me, thanks.
Heather Fuller has a great new book out Dick Cheney's Heart, I can recommend that without reservation.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Promoting the latest book, Tachycardia; tinkering with the pages of a new book file called "open container"; and drafting some pages for a new book, "cashless transactions".
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Ouroboros (1982-1989): bibliography, and an interview
Ottawa writer and editor Colin Morton is the
author of numerous poetry books and chapbooks, including In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), This Won’t Last Forever (Longspoon Press, 1985), The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems (Quarry
Press, 1987), How to Be Born Again (Quarry
Press, 1991), Coastlines of the
Archipelago (BuschekBooks, 2000), Dance,
Misery (Seraphim Editions, 2003), The
Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), The Hundred Cuts (BuschekBooks, 2009), and Winds and Strings (BuschekBooks, 2013)—as well as the novel Oceans Apart (Quarry Press, 1995).
Morton grew up in Alberta, and moved to Ottawa
soon after completing an MA in English at the University of Alberta in 1979. He
has performed and recorded his poetry with First Draft and other music poetry
groups, and his collaboration with Ed Ackerman, the animated film Primiti Too Taa (1988), based on Kurt
Schwitters’ Ursonate (Sonata in primitive
sounds), led to a Genie nomination, a Bronze Apple, and other international
film awards. He has been writer-in-residence at Concordia College (Moorhead,
MN, 1995-6) and Connecticut College (New London, CT, 1997).
From 1982 to 1989, he was editor and publisher
of Ouroboros, an Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks
and ephemera, producing works by himself, as well as a number of poets around
him at the time, including Susan McMaster, Chris Wind, Robert Eady, Margaret Dyment and John Bell, and culminated in the anthology Capital Poets, which included work by Nadine McInnis, John Barton,
Christopher Levenson and John Newlove. He is currently one of the organizers of The TREE Reading Series.
Q: What was the original impulse for starting
the press?
A: In the summer of 1982, the Tree Reading
Series organized Word Fest, a 2-day poetry festival at SAW Gallery in ByWard
Market, Ottawa. I edited a chapbook of the featured readers’ poems and worked
with artist Carol English to produce the booklets. At the end of the two days
of readings I came home hyper-excited and wrote my “Poem Without Shame” in one
night-long beat-inspired cry. I thought a lot of the poem and wanted it out there.
The prospect of sending it away to magazine editors and waiting a year maybe
two before seeing my poem printed almost secretly in some little journal did
not appeal to me. I liked the fold-old broadsheets that the League of Canadian
Poets had produced for some of its members, and I thought that would be a way
to get my poem shamelessly out into public. I chose a rigid cover stock and
asked Carol English to adorn my poem with some cover art – something suitably
surrealist – and the broadsheet was ready to hand out at readings.
From the start, I liked the idea of being able
to control how the printed product looked. I naturally looked around for other
projects.
Q: Were you part of the Tree Reading Series at
that time? What other activity, whether readings or publishing, were around you
at that time in Ottawa?
A: I had some production experience out west
with NeWest ReView, Literary Storefront Newsletter and
others, so Tree recruited me to create the WordFest catalogues. Ouroboros
authors Susan McMaster and Margaret Dyment I met at Tree readings, and others,
like Marty Flomen’s Orion series and Juan O’Neill’s Sasquatch. Christopher
Levenson edited Arc magazine, then
only a few years old, and hosted Arc readings as well. Ouroboros published
several of the Arc poets – John Bell,
Robert Eady and, later in the Capital
Poets anthology (1989), Levenson, Nadine McInnis, Sandra Nicholls, John
Barton, Blaine Marchand ... all these poets later published in solo editions by
Quarry Press out of Kingston, Ontario. So it was a fairly busy time for poetry
in Ottawa.
In addition to all that, I had weekly meetings
over coffee and beer with First Draft, a collective of writers, musicians and
artists who closed out Theatre 2000 near Byward Market in 1983 with a
multimedia performance that including my recital of “Poem Without Shame,” “wordmusic”
collaborations and others. The following year, 1984, saw First Draft’s third
annual group show appear in the form of a book from Ouroboros – an artist’s
book designed by Claude Dupuis of Ottawa. Dupuis filled every corner of every
page with visual information, leaving the printer literally no margin for
error. The result is The Scream, by
far the most ambitious piece of book-making Ouroboros attempted. Smaller
projects did use the visual resources of Ottawa’s print shops, and my own
desktop publishing efforts. Visual poetry predominated in postcards, posters
and chapbooks.
Q: What do you feel your activity through Ouroboros
accomplished, and what prompted the press to finally fold?
A: About the time I was rounding up operations
at Ouroboros, I had a phone call from John Buschek, who was thinking of
starting up his own literary press and asked if I had any advice. I told him it
would be a good idea to keep it small. Keep it small so that every project you
undertake receives your full attention and love. (By this time I had decided to
give my full creative attention to writing novels, one of which was eventually
published by Quarry in 1995.) The second piece of advice I gave Buschek was to
produce exactly what he wanted. We go into the arts, after all, to create
something of ourselves, we don’t write books, or print and distribute them, to
fulfill someone else’s dream. I’m glad to see BuschekBooks continuing to grow,
a little at a time and, reflecting on the Ouroboros years, I’m glad I could
bring those writers to wider public exposure, and to draw attention to Ottawa
as a place to make art and literature, to talk and argue about art and
literature, because these things matter.
Q: I’m curious about the activity you were
involved with out west, before you moved to Ottawa. What prompted the move, and
what differences did you see between the communities?
A: This is reaching back into the 70s, into the
real arts-and-crafts era of little magazine production. I was involved in
little magazines from high school, on though university and after. In 1973, I
co-edited Harbinger, an anthology of
southern Alberta writing that included Erin Mouré, Andy Suknaski and others. Later, at the NeWest ReView office, we received long strips of copy that we had
to glue into straight columns by eye. Layout really was a matter of cut and
paste. It could get messy. At Vancouver’s Literary Storefront there would be
collating parties, a collective effort to get the monthly publication out on
the streets before the events they announced. That was social media in those
days.
Like a lot of people, I moved to Ottawa for the
work – my wife Mary Lee’s work first and eventually my place in the publication
division of a federal department. After supply teaching in Vancouver, I’d have
gone anywhere at the first hint of an opportunity. After Vancouver, which had
an established literary culture with factions and rivalries, Ottawa was more
like Calgary and Edmonton – smaller, just getting active, open to newcomers and
new ideas.
Q: The press ended on a high note, with the
publication of the anthology Capital
Poets. In many ways, the anthology represents just as much the aesthetic of
the press as the poets active around you at the time. What was the selection
process for the anthology?
A: Here’s one of the difficulties in
reconstructing literary history. Capital
Poets has a finished look to it, and you might see it as a landmark – the eighties
generation in Ottawa. But it isn’t that and it didn’t set out to be. My
original idea was to put out a monthly leaflet featuring a single writer each
month – poetry or fiction or whatever – an author spotlight that could be
distributed at readings or given away in bookstores or through the mail. A
continuing series.
Two moments’ thought about the economics of the
enterprise, though, reveals the problem. We are deluged by a flood of paper; we
throw it away, often unread, whether it’s this week’s ads or poetry for the
ages. No, the practical way to highlight Ottawa’s writers was through an
anthology, up to ten pages from each of ten writers, printed and bound to be
kept and remembered a generation later.
Capital Poets
represents the poets I spent time with in the eighties, many of whom had connections
to Arc and Tree and other literary
groups. In a way, the collection was just as important for the writers who
weren’t included in the anthology. It mobilized some to create their own
anthologies, like Seymour Mayne’s Six
Ottawa Poets and Luciano Diaz’s broader Symbiosis
collections. In retrospect, I guess Capital
Poets is a kind of landmark; it’s from then that Ottawa writers really
start looking at ourselves as a community of interests. When I see Ottawa’s
varied literary communities cooperating in our annual VerseFest, WritersFest and
so on, I appreciate how much the city has matured, culturally, and how much it
continues to change.
Q: Well, and I know, too, of a whole slew of
Ottawa poets who didn’t respond to your anthology by putting out one of their
own, such as the loosely-grouped poets around Gallery 101: Dennis Tourbin,
Michael Dennis, Riley Tench, Ward Maxwell, etcetera. What was the response to
the anthology when it appeared?
A: Not to mention Diana Brebner and Marianne
Bluger, both emerging nationally about that time. The response to the anthology
was vigorous, back pre-Internet when the letters to the editor page gave one a
loud blowhorn. Again, the outsiders came across as more scandalized than the
insiders were pleased. They took their own inclusion for granted, I guess. I
could have gone ahead and published a second volume in the series. There were
obviously the poets to fill one out, but the anthology field seemed well
ploughed by that time, and I imagined writing would be a more satisfying use of
my time, which it was.
Q: Was it as simple as that, then, choosing
your writing over the publishing? You add Brebner and Bluger to my shortlist;
who or what else emerged during the period you were producing Ouroboros?
A: A number of things were wrapping up around
that time.
After theatrical productions of Susan McMaster’s
Dark Galaxies and my Kurt Schwitters
piece, The Cabbage of Paradise (with
3 actors and a 12-voice sound poetry choir), First Draft disbanded and members
Andrew McClure and David Parsons moved to Toronto.
My writing was going more and more into prose
and narrative, so the cross-media emphasis of Ouroboros was less top-of-mind.
The response to Capital Poets was disappointingly parochial (the opposite of what
I’d hoped the anthology would show).
At the day job, the big public service strike
started me thinking of going freelance instead. My son was going off to
university, and soon I would be offered writer-in-residence gigs in the U.S.
Things end for lots of reasons; more mysterious
is why some continue on despite the changes.
Memories tend to be short, and some exciting
developments can be forgotten until someone like you, rob, comes along to
preserve the memory somehow.
Ottawa in the 80s saw the emergence of valuable
venues like Gallery 101, where Dennis Tourbin animated literary events. There,
and at SAW Gallery, performance artists like Paul Couillard and Louis Cabri
were exploring language in the visual arts context.
The National Library was a regular venue for
national, international and local writers, thanks to Randall Ware’s direction.
Ottawa was a centre for the Chilean diaspora writers
like Jorge Etcheverry and others though Split Quotation Press.
Patrick White’s Anthos magazine ran as a quarterly tabloid. There were regular
reading series like Tree, Orion and Sasquatch.
Young writers were maturing and first books
were coming out. Blaine Marchand, though Ottawa Independent Writers (another
new organization then), introduced the Archibald Lampman Award.
Bywords
emerged from Ottawa U. as a monthly newsletter preceded, I believe, by another
monthly newsletter edited by James Cassidy.
Then as now, poets migrated to Ottawa from
across the country – John Barton and Stephen Brockwell, for instance – and international
poets were attached to embassies – like Shaheen who wrote ghazals in Urdu.
The trouble with such lists, like anthologies,
is that something will be left out. But maybe this is enough to suggest that
the Ottawa literary scene wasn’t a blank slate before the present generation
arrived.
Q: In hindsight, what do you consider the
biggest accomplishment of the press?
A: I'm inclined to let others decide what
Ouroboros achieved. It might be the publication of the first book by Susan
McMaster, Dark Galaxies; or the last
long-poem by John Newlove, “In Progress” in Capital
Poets; or a performing book like no other, The Scream.
But there’s something else, more personal.
I’m reminded of the Kafka parable about the man
who waits his whole life at the door of the castle to be admitted. No one ever
comes to invite him inside, and when it’s too late he realizes all he needed to
do was to walk through that door. By publishing Ouroboros, I learned that
Literature is not some great edifice or institution that we writers have to
approach with our begging bowls. It is the sum of everything writers,
publishers, critics do. As you know, rob, we just have to be bold enough to
walk on past the gate-keepers.
Ouroboros Bibliography
Broadsides
1982 – Colin Morton, “Poem Without Shame” (8.5 x 14,
3-fold); art by Carol English
1983 – Susan McMaster, “Seven Poems” (8.5 x 14, 3-fold);
art by Claude Dupuis
1983 – John Bell, “The Third Side” (11 x 17, 4-fold); art
by Suanne Rogers
1986 – Chris Wind, “The House that Jack Built” (11 x 17
poster)
1989 – Richard Kostelanetz, “Openings” (8.5 x 11, 3-fold)
Chapbooks
1983 – Margaret (Slavin) Dyment, “I Didn’t Get Used To It”
(24 pp.); art by Claude Dupuis
1987 – Colin Morton, “Two Decades: from A Century of Inventions” (28 pp.)
1989 – Nancy Corson Carter, “Patchword Quilt” (16 pp.)
Books
1984 – The Scream:
First Draft; the third annual group show (96 pp.); writing by Colin Morton,
Susan McMaster, Nan Cormier; music by Andrew McClure, Andrew Parsons; art by
Claude Dupuis, Carol English; design by Claude Dupuis
1985 – Robert Eady, The
Blame Business (50 pp.); cover art by Darien Watson
1986 – Susan McMaster, Dark
Galaxies (50 pp.); cover art by Roberta Huebener
1989 – Capital Poets (96
pp.); poetry by John Barton, Margaret Dyment, Holly Kritsch, Christopher
Levenson, Blaine Marchand, Nadine McInnis, Susan McMaster, Colin Morton, John
Newlove, Sandra Nicholls
Postcards
1983 – Colin Morton, “Dialogue 1” “Dialogue 2” “Dialogue 3”
“Dialogue 4”
1984 – Penn Kemp, “Incremental”
1984 – Colin Morton, “Twins”
1984 – LeRoy Gorman, “moon”
1985 – Noah Zacharin, “Blues”
1985 – Colin Morton, “I read a shadow on the stream”
1985 – Robert Eady, “Amnesty” “The Lie” “Concise History of
a Room” “How to Lube a Car”
1987 – Maureen Korp, “Melting Ice” (with art by Mitsu
Ikemura)
Friday, August 28, 2015
Colin Browne, The Hatch: poems and conversations
the
lava field
or without
in the lava fiexld
sicxk of himself
on the nigxht boat
this smallpox takes
the piss out of
proxfits
wisdom teeth, then
cervix
then the armisxtice
when I lisxten it’s
we’re safer, not safe
leaves bore legs
wind adores
across the on the
in the dowxn the
bring your shovel
and a strong knixfe
takes a bite
out of
wires, wirxed corners
who’s counting
it’s Rudolph that
goes down in history
de Montaigne on
cannibals
a sweextness
tunnel leggers
not craxftsmen
but specixalists
all the same
For
his newest collection, The Hatch: poems and conversations (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015), Vancouver poet and filmmaker Colin Browne continues his incredibly-dense exploration into the
serial/book-length poem, composing a collection that, as the book jacket
informs, “discovers its true nature as collage.” It is as though Browne doesn’t
approach his poetry collections as straightforward serial poems or collections,
but structuring a singular work of poetry from the perspective of a documentary
filmmaker (entirely different than the “documentary poem” named and championed by Dorothy Livesay), allowing a different kind of narrative flow to emerge, and
refreshing a book-length form that desperately requires a new way of seeing. In his recent review over at The Bull Calf,
Phil Hall writes:
In The Hatch, Browne is attempting the impossible, and hooray for
that: starting from where he is, and who he is (reaching back to Scotland)—he
is trying to pan the connections between Surrealism (André Breton, Francis
Picabia, etc.) and the West Coast and its Native arts and traditions. You will
perhaps remember a photo of André Breton’s desk and study, where art, totems,
and masks from BC are on display. One result is that Browne’s book is populated
by not only historical figures but by Wolf and Raven and Fungus Man, etc.
How could we not love
and be intrigued by a book of poems that celebrates the old-fashioned political
savvy of many of our waning heroes? These include (hold your hat) Norman
Bethune, Emily Carr, Hank Snow, Aimé Césaire, Charles Olson, Blaise Cendrars,
Buffy Sainte-Marie, Antonin Artaud, D H Lawrence, and Sorley MacLean… all in
evidence here.
Hall
might be the perfect reader for Browne’s work, as both have been, for some
time, constructing a series of ever-expanding poetry books-as-units-of-composition
utilizing history, personal information, mythology, narrative fragments and
collage, and a respect for and repeated homages towards forebears, whether personal
or literary, as well as a deep awareness of their natural environment. As Browne
writes: “now when i dial the stars / our grande
ourse – / Desnos’s bear – / is at the switchboard / good hands you’re in[.]”
The Hatch builds upon and furthers
the work of his three prior collections, all of which appeared through
Talonbooks—Ground Water (2002), The Shovel (2007) and The Properties (2012)—in their
exploration of expansive and densely-packed collage-works that stride across a
wide canvas, from lyric narrative to meditative fragment to impassioned
argument to conversational script, exploring the philosophies of origins across
politics, geographic space and an array of traditions. Still, there is as much
heart as documentary here. This book contains multitudes, to be sure, as well
as an array of feathers. As he writes towards the end of “granny soot”: “i was
an open mouth / without feathers or fins / a nestling at the sign / of the
celestial bear / i got a hook in the head / of the weir i wove / in the trickle
of a shallow / ditch[.]” And of course, as he explores in the poem “rideau,” there
are even some moments that explore the capital city, where he spent part of his
youth:
i’ve boned the old
syntax
the ox sprouts two
horns
and mistakes submission
for forgiveness. my colleagues
have been subjects for
so long
they’ve come to believe
that
collusion with
authority
while railing against
authority
will imbue them with the
authority
to deny having acquired
authority.
i’m listening to the
Peggy Lee Band’s
“Floating Island” and
hear
a better model for
being human.
i promise i won’t lie
to you
without knowing that
i am lying to you (“rideau”)
The
stretch and continuation of his lines and phrases are seemingly endless,
helping make The Hatch quite a hefty
collection, and one not just of size (nearly one hundred and fifty pages), but
in scope and scale, making so much else seem entirely too thin.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kate Rogers
Kate’s poetry about the Hong Kong protests has appeared in The Guardian and the Asia Literary Review. Other publication credits include the Kyoto Journal; ASIATIC: the Journal of English Language and Literature at the Islamic University of Malaysia; Contemporary Verse II; Orbis International; and Many Mountains Moving.
Kate’s previous books are City of Stairs (Haven 2012) and Painting the Borrowed House (Proverse 2008), both of which received publication grants from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Kate is co-editor of the OutLoud Too anthology (MCCM 2014) and co-editor of Not A Muse: the inner lives of women (Haven 2009).
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, Painting the Borrowed House (Proverse 2008) changed my life by showing me I had an audience for my poetry. It was far more personal, or "confessional" than what I write now, but also borrowed some of the cultural rituals and artefacts of Hong Kong which I have admired for many years. I think by including those aspects of Hong Kong life in my first book I discovered my own myths. My most recent poetry collection, Foreign Skin (Aeolus House 2015), has a lot more persona poems. Some also feature Chinese cultural rituals and myths, but weave them together with my own myths, my questions about my cultural heritage (Ukrainian). At the same time, this latest book is less confessional. I also like to think I have continued to work on my craft and that this most recent book is the best crafted of the three collections I have written.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I like what Margaret Atwood said about poetry in a talk she gave at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009. She described poetry as "condensed emotion". Poetry has always felt like the best way for me to look more deeply at a feeling, to pause with a moment. Fiction can do that - the short stories of Canadian Alice Munro pivot around moments. Hong Kong writer Xu Xi, whose work I teach in an Asian Writers in English course, has many stories which spotlight a moment: a revelation (To Body, to Chicken from Access: Thirteen Tales). Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain and Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters both follow the main characters movements and interactions with a camera eye, but poetry is different for me. Its brevity allows more room for intensity and for epiphany.
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?
My work seldom comes out almost ready to share. My poetry usually goes through many drafts. I try to look at drafts several times before sending them out to a literary journal. The nature of my job means I have enforced gaps between editing drafts and that can be good because | see my work more clearly. If I am working on a series of linked poems I may write a lot of notes before drafting the poem. That can be especially true while drafting a persona poem about a real person. I feel that I have to inhabit that person's life as much as possible so I can experience empathy for him or her.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I have done both. My first two books were assembled from poems which came together around themes organically, especially my second book, City of Stairs (Haven 2012). I got a grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council for that collection in part because I had forty per-cent Hong Kong content, so that affected how the book took shape too.
My latest book, Foreign Skin, doesn't have the same constraints. The poems in that book came together naturally, but there is a whole section, "Ah Ku" poems, in the voices of Asian women from backgrounds, communities and periods of history where they had little or no voice.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy doing readings and like to share my work. I learn from doing that. Poetry was meant to be read aloud before it was written, so the spoken rhythm of poetry is important to feel its shape. I often go away from readings ready to tweak poems I've just read again. I read from Foreign Skin at Art Bar in Toronto on July 28th.
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?
I do have a theoretical concern behind my writing: giving voice to those who could not express themselves, usually disenfranchised or isolated women from traditional cultures and a distant past.
This concern behind my writing has led me to ask which questions a writer must consider to avoid appropriation of voice. I will be participating in a panel on that topic at the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators conference in Manila, the Philippines, in October 2015. It has been very easy for white writers to take on the voice of any character they choose, of any race or culture for many generations, but writers of colour have not found it as easy to write about race - whether in their own voice or that of a persona - and find a white audience. (This is a big concern for writers of colour in MFA programs at American universities these days.) Writers from India, Malaysia and China, among other Asian countries, are producing books in English at a rate they never have before. Yet they can still feel boxed into writing clichéd stories about immigrant struggle or isolation in the suburbs (Michelle Cahill, Australia).
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 I answered that question about the role of the writer in larger culture to some extent above. In addition to being a writer, I lecture in literature and creative writing at the Community College of City University in Hong Kong. I think it is my duty as a writer who teaches to keep reading and teaching the works of my peers in Asia - writers from Malaysia, India, China, the Philippines - Ricky de Ungria; Sreedevi Iyer; Xinran, Amitav Ghosh, Luis Francia - and to promote the reading of their work to my students so their experience is mirrored for them.
I also think that as a Canadian poet I need to keep reading local poets and writers such as Alice Major and Bruce Meyer and Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier and Donna Langevin and John Wall Barger and Heather Roberts Cadsby and John B.Lee and Evelyn Lau and rob mclennan and Anna Yin and Madeleine Thien, along with so many others, so I can keep learning from them and learning how to communicate with a Canadian audience while I am responding to life in Asia.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have found working with my two editors very helpful. Both of them were kind and patient yet challenging. Thank you John Wall Barger for your help on Foreign Skin and Kate Marshall Flaherty for our work together on City of Stairs. I learned a lot from both of them. John in particular pushed me to push my writing further than I knew it could go and I really appreciate that.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don't let self-doubt or rejections prevent you from writing. Those feelings may slow you down for a day, but get back to writing as soon as possible.
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?
If I am not teaching, a writing day begins with me reading poetry to get myself into the altered state of consciousness I need to be in to create my own poetry. It was Buddha's birthday today and I was at home writing, but first read some of Mary Oliver's Blue Horses and Sharon Olds' The Wellspring. They helped me find what I wanted to write about and access the part of myself from which to do that.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading the poets I admire can help me a lot. Or I swim for 45 minutes and let my mind go.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sun-warmed pine needles.
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?
I have ekphrastic poetry which responds to the art of Van Gogh, and the Japanese artist Hokusai, in which the artist’s daughter O-ei speaks. I also have a series in the voice of German war artist Otto Dix, an exhibition of whose work I saw in Montreal about four years ago. Science can also inspire me. I've recently been reading about heart strings - the literal part of the muscle behind the cliché.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read widely because I also teach Asian literature in English. I have already mentioned some of those writers who are important to my work above. Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being made a big impact on me and I read a lot of Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami because I love their surreal view of the world and my students respond to their writing. I am reading more American poets such as Mark Strand, and short story writers like Junot Diaz and Thad Rutkowski, but being in a former British colony, I also still have access to the poetry of Stevie Smith and Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. I am lucky that I can still access such a variety of books while living in Hong Kong. I fear that eventually that will change here.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to write a collection of largely historical persona poems in the voices of a range of women in Asia - the local women and the travelling Victorian women - and somehow weave their experiences - both separate and where they connect - together into a book.
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?
I am doing that other occupation as a lecturer in literature, creative writing and media studies.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is my vocation. I can't live without it - it's my life's blood. Teaching complements writing except when I have periods of heavy grading or administrative duties. It can be hard to balance the two at times, but I often feel very lucky I can do both because my vocation is fed by my profession, and vice versa.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was The Orenda about the last days of the Hurons. I found the alternating points of view compelling. Joseph Boyden's writing keeps me connected to Canada and the troubled history of our country. I found The Orenda raw, deeply disturbing and moving. Another book I mentioned earlier - Junichro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, also made a strong impression on me. The story is set in pre-WWII Japan and tells a slow and meandering tale of four sisters and their struggles to find asuitable husbands for the younger two women as Japanese society becomes more westernised and women have more choices. The narrator reflects on the nuances of the younger sisters' behaviour and their implications at length. The book reminds me of Pride and Prejudice, but it isn't as amusing. I am also reading Susan Morgan's book Bombay Anna, on Anna of the King and Siam fame because of my interest in the real woman behind the icon. One of the last great films I saw was The Life of Pi based on the novel by Yann Martel. There have been others too, but that stands out.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I have begun to work on the project I mentioned above: a collection of largely historical persona poems of women from and in Asia - the local women and the travelling Victorian women. I even have a few poems in the voice of the fictional character Fenella Crabbe, wife of the well-intentioned, but ineffectual British school master, Victor Crabbe, from the first book of the Anthony Burgess Malayan Trilogy - Time for a Tiger.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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