Joan Naviyuk Kane’s books and chapbooks of prose and poetry include The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, A Few Lines in the Manifest,
Sublingual (November 2018), and Another Bright Departure (March 2019).
She is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Kane was a Harvard National Scholar, and the
recipient of a graduate Writing Fellowship from Columbia University’s School of
the Arts. Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, she raises her
children as a single mother in Anchorage, Alaska.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most
recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Writing and revising The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife over the course
of 8 years changed my life in that it compelled me to survive, to step away
from the autobiographical narrative line by line, and to move with language
into language from language back into the imagination. My most recent work
doesn’t yet have the same prosodic and sonic compression, struggles to get out from under the influence
of glampoet production and performativity, tangles with autobiographical
narrative line by line. It feels different in that the spare reticence that
others characterized my first book is now a forced reticence. I am rather terse
and embattled now rather than controlled, gracelessly direct rather than
gracefully evasive, sentimental rather than cognitively-driven, and a
perpetuator of pattern rather than an observer of it.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction
or non-fiction?
I lacked a narrative gift, and was unable to get a grasp on
underpinnings of good fiction like character motivation, deft exposition of
complex emotions, and dialogue. Literary non-fiction takes so much time and
such a negotiation of dimension, relevance, and sustaining a reader’s (and the
writer’s) interest sentence after sentence and paragraph after paragraph page
after page after page. I had and have no idea where the story was/is going, at
times I wonder if there’s any story there at all or just chaos. Poems, on the
other hand, I continue to teach and re-learn, might be image-driven, dwell in
good old negative capability, move from mind to hand to page through language
and language only. And that latterly triplet is a helluva lot more manageable
when you’ve an infant and a toddler, then two toddlers, and lots of diapers and
very little time, space, and sleep.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?
Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first
drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of
copious notes?
It takes me forever to sit down to write. But when I finally do,
it slowly comes quickly – far more
quickly than I can physically keep up with. First drafts often retain some kind
of essential architecture, but I’m having difficulty these days finding my line,
and my formerly-copious (if brief) notes have been reduced to whatever I can
tap my watch and beg Siri to create a reminder for, things that appear on my
iPhone is “I say ally in an image,” or “The forest makes its own dark.”
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?
The books are working on me from the very beginning. They stomp
into my mind as images, as lines, as a word whose etymology demands me to
interrogate it, and myself. These little flickers of consciousness accrue into
the light in the sky behind/beyond virga. Then I write like hell before the
weather passes overhead.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have been treated for performance anxiety with beta blockers since
my childhood (I am a violinist), and readings, though at turns loathed and grateful
for (when they go well, when they pay well, when they result in those humans in
the audience crying, when I read the work aloud as I meant to utter it in the
first place), are certainly part of my creative process now. I hate the
performance aspect of contemp lit culture, I hate not giving a fuck how it goes
going in as long as I get it over with. But hate, too, is a kind of enjoying.
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 am still rereading my undergraduate Clairefontaine notebooks
(even though, as my not-soon-enough-to-be-ex-husband’s current attorney jabs at
me every week with another reminder that I should be preparing my home for sale
and should box them up and put them away along with my dreams of a happy and
productive midlife of focus on my work and my parenting) of lecture and seminar
notes from every brilliant encounter with Barbara Johnson. I had a blissful
moment last month when one of my favorite writers sat in my backyard and
indulged me when I asked them to take my iPhone and read to me about de Man and
pharmakon from my Kindle app. My concerns remain: translation, phenomenology,
gender, ecology, personhood. The contested.
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?
To survive. To help others survive. Yes. To survive and to help
something and someone survive this grim Anthropocene.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
It would be lovely, and is essential, and I seem never ever to
have the opportunity. I love working myself as an outside editor, and I’m good
at it. It’s difficult. If something is facile, I’m probably nowhere near it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily
given to you directly)?
Your poems don’t have to make sense to your readers. Your poems do
not have to make sense to you. You must just make your poems.
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?
I no longer have one. A typical day begins with checking Twitter
as soon as my watch and phone stir me into wakefulness. I seek urgency and
follow the weather of the day. I bring myself out of bed to nurture my children
when they’re in my custody. Then I make my way down the list of legal and
medical and administrative tasks immediately before me. If I have a moment to
write, to think, to be alone or in generative conversation with literature of
any kind, I’m in my new routine.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return
for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Jean Valentine. My ancestors. The land. The impossibly possible.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Water in the air, or snow as it scours the sky on its way down to earth,
or decaying highbush cranberries. Or best and truest: Labrador tea leaves.
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?
Nature. Music. Painterly composition. Ivory carving. Ceremonial
masks carved from (drift)wood. Computer science, networks, nodes, rhizomes.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,
or simply your life outside of your work?
Sherman Alexie. Sherwin Bitsui. Abigail Chabitnoy. Santee Frazier.
Terese Mailhot. Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen. Tommy Orange. Joseph Senungetuk. Jake Skeets. Monique Sanchez.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Bring my children to King Island, to the Faroe Islands, to
Hokkaido. Finalize my divorce. Have my hysterectomy and recovery over with.
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?
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The crucible of circumstance: writing was and is a responsibility
I cannot escape. There are so few people who are born poets and have the good
fortune to find their way through the world as poets. It’s in the life and
death force that drive my every intention.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last
great film?
Olga Tokarczuk’s FLIGHTS (translated by Jennifer Croft). Black Panther.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Getting page proofs of
SUBLINGUAL back to the publisher. Getting the final manuscript of ANOTHER
BRIGHT DEPARTURE to the publisher, 12 days behind schedule, now. Writing and
revising and refusing to abandon DARK TRAFFIC. Compiling medical records,
affidavit responses, and tax records from the past 11 years, and reading these
things as I dare in order to figure out how and if I can write a full-length
memoir.
No comments:
Post a Comment