12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Buccieri

Laura Buccieri is the author of the chapbooks Songbook for a Boy Inside (Belladonna* 2018) and On being mistaken (PANK Books, 2018).  Her work can be found in Metatron, DUM DUM Zine, Prelude, Cosmonauts Avenue, Lambda Literary, Word Riot, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is the Publicist at Copper Canyon Press & holds an MFA in poetry from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn and on Instagram at @lauruhboocherry.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My book launched at AWP and I remember seeing people carrying it around— having something tangible that represented my work felt really good. I think being able to see my work live on people’s bookshelves is also really wonderful.

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

I was always interested in sounds and the way words play off of one another. When reading out loud as a kid, I had to sound out a lot of words. It made me super detail oriented when it comes to the way a word sounds. I love the cadence of syllables and I love that that can tell a story. I’m also much more inclined to sprint rather than run miles upon miles, sprinting reminds me of poetry.

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 don’t think I’m a project based writer— I usually write on the notes app in my phone and that is very much a fragmented way of writing. I have pieces of poems, one liners, and full poems on my phone and every couple months or so I’ll copy and paste them into a document on my computer and see what’s there. There is usually a theme because writing is obsession on paper and an obsession at any given moment tends to be about one thing. I tend to edit as I go, so things usually look pretty close to how I first wrote them, minus all the spelling errors.

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?

A poem begins with a line or an image that I can’t get out of my head then it really just flows from there. I don’t start working on a book, but rather take things one poem at a time.

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

Absolutely part of. Half of the reason I first got into poetry was because of the community. I love reading and I love supporting other poets and organizers by going to their readings. I remember being in college and being asked to read one of my poems at a reading and that mix of excitement and fear came upon me and I just got addicted to that feeling. I think it is important for me to have people see me and put a face to the poetry. I love when poets take up space and make people confront the art form head on in a physical, communal space.

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 mean a lot of what I deal with has to do with being queer, but I don’t know how theoretical that is. The world is concerning and childhood is always confusing so those also show up in there, but honestly three’s also a lot fo humor and joy in my work too.

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 think it is my place to proclaim what writer’s roles should be. I know that reading can be a solitary act and therefore allow people to feel their feelings and process them on their terms. I know that writing has helped me be more of who I want to be in the world. I hope that writing connects people and highlights the similarities that we all have. I hope writing also illuminates a new story or a new word or a new way of thinking that expands the world in a positive way. I hope writing is a community. I hope writing holds people accountable to their actions. I hope writing holds a mirror up to the reader but also offers them a window into a new world.

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

Essential.

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

It doesn’t cost any extra to be nice.

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 write mostly on the notes app on my phone. I don’t write well under the pressure of a blank notes doc. I have a 9-5 at Copper Canyon so the day begins with coffee and advocating for CCP poets and usually ends with dinner while looking over my own writing and reading that of others. I just finished Morgan Parker’s new collection and it was so so so good that every time I read a poem to myself I turned to my partner and said I have to read this to you.

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

I remember coming home very drained from high school and watching interviews with writers, musicians, actors, directors, etc. I’m still so obsessed with that and I’ll spend hours watching and rewatching these interviews on youtube. I think it is really inspiring to see people being celebrated for their passion. It is also another medium (video) to interact with, which always jumpstarts my brain.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I feel like I have two homes: my childhood home, which I go back to often, and my chosen home in Brooklyn with my partner.

The sprinklers watering the lawn is a smell that reminds me of my childhood home—water on grass, water on pavement. Always in the morning, so the sun is hitting it in the most perfect of ways.

These dryer sheets that my partner buys and then scatters on the shelves in our closets, so every time I open the closet door to get my clothes I’m hit with the fragrance and it always reminds me of her and of home, which are really synonymous.

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?

All of the above. I can learn to read from reading but I don’t think I could write without being moved by other art forms. I also think writing is a curious art form, so it would make sense for writers to turn to other art forms in order to understand something.

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

Too many to list. But, I’ll tell you what’s on my bedside table right now. Ocean Voung’s new novel. Morgan Parker’s new collection. Lorca’s collected poems. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines. Freeman’s Journal. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib. Work books: The Dream of Reason by Jenny George. The Tradition by Jericho Brown. Soft Targets by Deborah Landau. Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. It’s a big pile and I’m always scared it will fall over on me during the night.

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

That’s a big question. I’d love to experience what it’s like to be a line cook at a restaurant. I’d love to play in the WNBA. I’d love to live abroad for a year. I’d love to live by the sea. I’d love to be able to run better. I’d love to be able to text faster. I’d love to learn how to be a pilot. And so many more things.

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 went on an archaeological dig in Turkey when I was in high school and I majored in anthropology so I’d like to think I’d be an archaeologist— underwater archaeologist? I’d also truly love to be a chef. I was applying to MFA programs at the same time as culinary school. So, if I hadn’t gotten into my MFA program, who knows where I’d be or what I’d be cooking. Or honestly, I’d love to just coach my future kid’s basketball team (gosh I hope they play sports) and have that be a career.

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

Necessity. And community.

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

Bad Moms Christmas made me laugh harder than anything and I was on a plane just laughing/laughcrying at this movie. It was just the oddest thing. Book-wise, well, I read a ton for work and I adore all those books. But, if I took CCP out of the mix I’d say Morgan Parker’s forthcoming collection. She’s a genius. Seriously.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I have a chapbook, Songbook for a boy inside, coming out with Belladonna* in Dec 2018. I’m excited for that to be in the world and honored to be a part of the Belladonna* family.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty

My notebooks are not diaries because they have no timestamps. Dating the entries would impose a structure, a sense of continuity and narrative, on the writing inside. They capture thoughts, not events; they are lyric notebooks. I’d be having thoughts anyway, but now I write them down—and knowing I might must alter the thoughts. Before I can write one, it has to become a sentence, an object with a shape. When I was seven or eight, I confessed to my mother that I couldn’t stop narrating my life back to myself; I thought it meant I was crazy. No, she said, it means you’re a writer. I’ve since gotten used to it, that layer of language like running commentary between my direct experience and the external record of it. (“Personal Data: Notes on Keeping a Notebook”)

The collected short essays that make up Denver, Colorado poet Elisa Gabbert’s The Word Pretty (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2018) are very much a logical extension of her published books-to-date, utilizing writing itself as her thinking form in the poetry collections The French Exit (Birds, LLC, 2010), The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013) [see my review of such here] and L’Heure Bleue or The Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016) [see my review of such here]. In The Word Pretty, her “thinking form” simply exists in a shape more familiar to a wider readership wishing to engage with her series of studies, captured in short, narrative theses on more specific topics, as opposed to her more wide-ranging and expansive book-length studies structured in the open lyric and collage of her poetry collections. Over the course of twenty-three short essays, Gabbert explores the minutae of a variety of subjects, from crying, dreams, journal-writing and “How to Be Pretty on TV,” as well as various pieces on writing and the writing process, including “What Poetry Is,” “Writing that Sounds like Writing,” “Why Read Novels?” and “The Art of the Paragraph,” as well as the essay “Aphorisms Are Essays,” that includes:

            In other words, an aphorism is not a truth but a kind of test (an assay), a statement you are meant to run up against to decide if you agree. If you don’t agree, that is not necessarily a failure of the aphorism. The best aphorisms are not the most true but the most undecidable, those worth endlessly retesting. In The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits writes of herself and her husband: “We love to take a conviction we might, for a moment, entertain, and then turn it on its head and make a joke about it. This joking is our form of the Socratic Method. Our jokes are interrogations that help us figure out what we care about, and where our faith, at the moment, lies.” (Jokes as essays.)

            Twitter has made my poetry more aphoristic. Formally, it’s a platform ideally suited to the aphorism; in fact aphorisms should be quite a bit less than 140 characters. Further, you can like an aphorism even if you disagree, or aren’t sure you agree. “RT ≠ endorsement,” as many Twitter bios attest, but nor does a like imply endorsement. Some tweets, of course, aspire to literal, factual truth—those that report on science or the news, for example. But others are more like essays or poems or novels that can’t, fundamentally, be true or not true; it’s a category error.

In essays that read both slightly wistful and deeply grounded, Gabbert’s incredibly precise and exploratory prose manages to get to the heart of some impossible things, giving weight to what would otherwise be abstract and even ephemeral, providing enough weight to allow her to hold in her hands and properly examine. Her text moves from fact to fact, idea to idea, and through the process, turn what would otherwise be a random assortment of information into something far greater. Compact in both form and physical book-size, this was a smart, endearing and entirely pleasurable read, and Gabbert manages to assemble what could have been a collage of thoughts and meandering into a casual series of direct lines of thinking. Through the process, The Word Pretty also presents some quite lovely and startling bits of information, including this intriguing nugget that opens her essay-quartet “The Inelegant Translation: Four Essays on Language”:

There’s an idea in linguistics that until a culture creates a name for a color, they don’t really see it as a distinct category. It builds from the anthropological discovery that languages tend to develop color terms in the same order: first, for black and white (or roughly, light and dark), then for red, then for either green or yellow and then both, then blue (and so on). They don’t invent a word for blue, the thinking goes, much less for mauve or taupe, until they need it. Color terms proliferate in a world of dyes and spectrometry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with rob mclennan (Vallum magazine

Last spring, Jay Ritchie emailed me on behalf of Montreal’s Vallum magazine, asking if I might be interested in answering my own “12 or 20 questions” for the journal. I said yes, of course, even while pointing out that I had actually answered the questions prior, way back in 2008, near the end of the first series of interviews. So, from May 16-18, 2018, ten years after my first interview in the series posted, I worked on the questions for a second time. How much difference might a decade make? A lot, most likely. My interview appeared in their print journal last fall, issue #15.2, and appear here with their permission. I thank all the Vallum-ers for the prompt (specifically Jay, who did the prompting). Thanks.

And, as always, I remind that I attempt to provide links to all of my interview posted online here, if you wish to check out further of my answers.

12 OR 20 QUESTIONS FOR ROB MCLENNAN

1643 interviews, 133 chapbooks, 81 journal publications, 33 books, 7 books as editor—rob mclennan’s contributions to Canadian arts and letters read like a pinball machine high score you look up at and can only dream of. And, as rob pointed out to me when I sent him this introduction, those numbers will be out of date by the time this magazine goes to print. Read this introduction again tomorrow, and the numbers will be even further from fact. Point is, he’s prolific. In 2003, mclennan started his eponymous blog, which features reviews, poems, editorials, tour notes, and, in 2007, his infamous “12 or 20 questions” interview questionnaire, which began when he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. Fifteen years after the inauguration of his blog, he is conducting the 12 or 20 questions for (literally) more than the thousandth time, but this time, he’s answering the questions himself. —Jay Ritchie

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?

I felt that the publication of my first chapbook, self-published in 1992, allowed me into a conversation. My first full-length collection in 1998 (as well as my second collection, a year later) provided me with the quick knowledge of what publishing a book of poetry meant in the larger culture, and exactly what it didn’t mean. There were some hard lessons, but some enormous opportunities as well.

My most recent work feels hundreds of thousands of leagues away from those first published scribblings. In many ways, I barely recall who that person was. I sometimes shake my head at him.

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

During my high school years I was engaged with poetry and short stories, photography and visual art, as well as attempting to teach myself guitar, and moving through what became thirteen years of piano lessons. I even sent a poorly-executed comic book script to Marvel when I was sixteen, and received a very polite, and, I daresay, generous rejection in response.

Once my first daughter was born in January 1991 (two months shy of my own twenty-first birthday), I thought I should either write properly, or not at all. Around that time I’d seen a quote by Margaret Atwood along the lines of: if you want full-time out of it, you have to put full-time into it. I was young, stupid and broke, and couldn’t afford art supplies, so writing seemed the best route. I told myself I should focus on one thing, and figure that out. I chose poetry, telling myself that once I got a handle on that, I would branch out into another form, say, fiction or visual art. Those things did re-emerge, but not for some time after.

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’ve only had a laptop since around 2010 or so, which allowed me to shift much of my poetry composition from longhand to keyboard. I suppose it was more a function of opportunity than design. I spent years composing poems longhand in the order they eventually sat on the page, despite how many dozens of drafts may have occurred in the process. These days, most of my poems evolve more organically, and often from the inside out. Lines are expanded, cut, moved around, sutured, picked at. Reduced. Poems may evolve from a line or a phrase or a word or a structure or an idea and then shape like a pearl around that first grain (or irritant, to continue the metaphor). I suppose I could also offer this as a microcosm of how my poetry manuscripts develop.

Fiction emerges in fits and starts, in chunks. Some stories take months to find themselves, although I often work on two or three concurrently. Perhaps this is also, simply, a variation on what I’ve already described, but characters often emerge through threads I’ve collected that cohere slowly into a person and whatever situation they might be in. A parental death. A twin. Married. Two daughters. Etcetera. With enough threads woven in, other ideas suggest themselves. At times, the stories write themselves; I just have to be attentive enough to sit and listen to what I’ve already begun.

Compared to, say, a decade ago, I’m far more comfortable sitting on something when it doesn’t feel entirely, exactly finished.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

To paraphrase Michael Ondaatje quoting Jack Spicer, in the introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Coach House Press, 1979): the poems can no more live on their own than can we.

I haven’t really thought in terms of the single poem since the early 1990s. Even my single poems see themselves as an eventual collection of single poems. I would say the same for my fiction. I write in terms of the full-length book as my unit of composition, and have for quite a long time.

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

I enjoy doing readings, but they also fill me with a great deal of anxiety. I know writers who practice reading aloud before presenting work publicly, but I’ve always heard the work in my head during composition, so I’ve never read anything aloud before reading work before an audience. I’m also now at the point that I occasionally pull a pen from my pocket during a reading, for the sake of a quick edit. Sometimes there are still things that are only caught when reading aloud.

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?

That is something I’ve been contemplating far more over the past decade, after seeing how certain poets are able to articulate the political in their own works, from Stephen Collis to Jordan Abel to Layli Long Soldier to Morgan Parker to Sachiko Murakami to so many others. How does one attempt to articulate elements of the world in a productive way, especially without dismissing or excluding those voices that should be heard over my own? How can one simply be writing pretty lyric without including some of the darker elements of larger culture, from Idle No More to Black Lives Matter? I haven’t quite figured out an answer to such (and an easy answer is impossible), especially knowing that topics like these aren’t helped by me offering up my opinions. Sometimes this is the best part of being active on social media: I can forward those articles and such by those that should be heard over my nonsense, attempting to provide a signal boost.

And then I think of Milan Kundera, who managed to include the social, the political, the personal, the sexual and the intimate equally throughout his own novels. This level of across the board engagement (as opposed to a novel focusing on one element over the rest) is a model for what I wish to eventually accomplish, especially with fiction. I’m not there yet.

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?

As I heard someone else say recently, the role of the writer should be the same as the citizen, which is one of respectful engagement, deep listening and constant questioning. As jwcurry has said on occasion, his biggest goal as a writer/artist is to “remain interested.”

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

I’ve been years seeking out proper editors, honestly. Karl Siegler was great during my Talonbooks days, and Bev Daurio was a magnificent editor for my two novels with The Mercury Press. I was quite amazed with what Rolf Maurer at New Star did with A perimeter (2016): he actually blended elements of two unpublished poetry manuscripts I’d sent him and created a third, something that I remain stunned by and thrilled with, and wouldn’t have constructed as such. There wasn’t much in the way of line edits; more of a reconstruction, really. I was startled by the book that emerged.

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

Be quiet. Listen.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to essays to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’m rather fond of those works that shift between genre, and I would like to think I’ve made my own progress there, especially with my more lyric prose-fiction (which is occasionally mistaken for poetry, for reasons I don’t quite understand). I am fascinated by the blur.

Also: I don’t exclusively read one type of work, so why should I be constrained to working the same?

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?

We’re in a bit of a transition as I write (mid-May), as our toddler has dropped her nap, losing my weekdays of some two to two-and-a-half hour daily stretches of potential writing. The four-year-old is in junior kindergarten full-time, but the toddler is in but two mornings a week of preschool. I think her mornings might have to increase, if I’ve lost that nap time. That loses me some ten to fourteen hours a week of writing time.

I am still adapting, I think, to this period of full-time home with small children, after some twenty-five years of full-time writing. While this time with the girls has been marvellous, I begin to itch for when the wee one begins her own full-time school, which should be more than enough to keep me productive. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it remains a ways off.

Moving through literary research on Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood recently, I took comfort in reading a 1970s article in the Glebe Report on then-local writer Carol Shields, who was writing some three hours a day when her five children were at school, but unable to work at all during weekends or over the summer.

A typical day begins with making coffee, and putting the kettle on for oatmeal for the young ladies. I dress myself, and feed the children. Once they’ve eaten, I clean them both and get them dressed. If I can get Rose’s school lunch prepared by 8am, I know I might have time to read my morning newspaper. I check my blog once it posts at 8:31am and email and tweet out as required. We aim to be out the door by 8:37am, and Aoife and I drop Rose off at school (which is, fortunately, but three blocks away). On Aoife’s mornings, I drop her at preschool, and am at my desk by 9:07, for a two hour and ten minute stretch before leaving again to collect her.

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

If I feel stalled, I sometimes move to another project. Sometimes putting a poem or story down to revisit it later is enough to rattle something loose. Other times I read. If I’m really stalled, I might ask someone else to look something over.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Fresh cut grass.

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?

I’ve said before that really good television or movies have often prompted my prose. An episode of Mad Men. The movie Smoke (1995).

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

Given I’m home full-time with small children, my reading is months behind, but the list evolves, constantly. Recently, I’ve been quite taken with works by AliSmith, Evelyn Reilly, Emilia Nielsen, Cameron Anstee, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore and Maggie Nelson. Certain go-to writers over the past few years have included Sawako Nakayasu, Amelia Martens, Robert Kroetsch, Pattie McCarthy, Cole Swensen, Kate Greenstreet and Rosmarie Waldrop (which might contextualize some of my shift over the past decade into the prose poem). Discovering the work of Anna Gurton-Wachter last year was a gift.

Really, my most cherished writer over the past decade or so has easily been Brian Michael Bendis, who allowed for a major shift over at Marvel Comics. I’m curious to see what he might do now that he’s moved over to DC. It means I might actually have to start reading books by DC.

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

I wouldn’t mind a bit more travel, here and there. I can’t really think of too much else at the moment.

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?

It’s funny what threads fall away, and others follow through. How did I get here? Over the years, I’ve tinkered with music, visual art, photography and filmmaking (on both sides of the camera), as well as time spent as a farm labourer, kitchen staff, waiting tables and running a home daycare, but this is where I’ve ended up. I wouldn’t change a thing.

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

I think, at this point I’ve convinced myself that I’m not much good at much else, although it’s more likely that I’d rather be doing this than just about anything. But in my twenties, writing seemed far more possible than most other arts, given it requires but paper and pen, and what has become that most elusive of properties: time.

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

Some books that have struck me lately would include Layli Long Soldier’s remarkable Whereas (Graywolf, 2017) and Jack Davis’ Faunics (Pedlar Press, 2017), as well as Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (Book*hug, 2018). I say: wow.

Oh my. Black Panther was incredible. We’ve seen it a couple of times now.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m still poking away at a series of short stories, as well as my post-mother creative non-fiction manuscript, “The Last Good Year.” Earlier in the spring, I composed a prose-poetry sequence, “snow day,” that might end up shaping itself into the first section of a larger poetry manuscript. As of yet, I’m not entirely sure what that might look like, but I haven’t really the attention span for that at the moment. If and when something occurs, I’ll run with it as best I can, and see what comes. That’s how “snow day” emerged, as a brief idea that suddenly took over six weeks or thereabouts of writing before it was complete (and produced as a chapbook through above/ground press in March 2018, just in time for my birthday).

Otherwise? Reviews, I suppose. Lots and lots of reviews.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Christine Stewart, Treaty 6 Deixis

In that way look in that way

In that way there where

those bones were

like that where we were there was this noise this noise was

the centre of our attention

After years of itinerant publishing through small and smaller venues, Edmonton-based poet and critic Christine Stewart’s long-awaited debut is the book-length essay-poem Treaty 6 Deixis (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018). While this might be her full-length solo debut, Stewart is also the author of a full-length collaboration with Toronto poet and editor David Dowker—Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013)—and an incomplete list of her chapbooks would include The Barscheit Horse [with Lisa Robertson and Catriona Strang] (Hamilton, ON: Berkeley Horse, 1993), A Travel Narrative (Berkeley Horse, 1994), Daddy Clean Head (Vancouver, BC: Lumpe Presse, 2000), From Taxonomy (Sheffield, England: West House Press, 2003), Pessoa’s July: or the months of astonishment (Vancouver, BC: Nomados Press, 2006), The Trees of Periphery (Edmonton AB: above/ground press, 2007) and The Odes (Nomados Press, 2015).

On this river – North Saskatchewan

Will and welcome as the day which when that sun shines

Makes water grow or covers others more often

Composed in fragments and short bursts, Treaty 6 Deixes is a poem that engages with the people and the place of what is now known as Alberta, and the river valley that snakes and rolls through what is now the City of Edmonton, exploring an engagement with not only the people and the place, but an agreement between peoples, one that has been regularly and repeatedly broken, battered and mangled by the Crown. As the back cover to the collection informs: “Deixis, from the ancient Greek noun for ‘reference,’ means a word or phrase – ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘now,’ ‘then’ – pointing to the time, place, or situation in which a speaker is speaking, or a writer is writing. Written beside the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy (North Saskatchewan River) on Treaty 6 land, which encompasses most of Central Alberta and Saskatchewan, this long poem reinstates and resounds the extent of the author’s obligations as a settler, considering the ways that language might be formally and contextually engaged to re-situate us in the world.” To open her “TREATY SIX FROM UNDER MILL CREEK BRIDGE” from the anthology Toward. Some. Air., edited by Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], Stewart writes:

In “Treaties Made in Good Faith,” Sharon Venne, Cree scholar and lawyer, rejects the Government version of Treaty Six: the Indigenous Nations of that territory never surrendered their land, their governments, their legal systems, their children, or their lives. Venne’s understanding of Treaty Six comes from her Elders, who have spoken to Venne, and who have cited the Elders who negotiated with the Commissioners at the signing of the Treaty, in 1876: “We are not selling our land. We cannot sell our land … We have a relationship with the land. The Creation placed us here on Great Turtle Island and this is our land. However, we will let you live on our land.

That is, as the Elders explain it, the only way non-Indigenous people and their communities can inhabit Indigenous land is through the Treaty agreements. Which is not to say that non-Indigenous people (Canadians) don’t belong here,rather that we are here because of agreements that bind us (inexorably) to the Indigenous Nations and to the land, and that all Canadians are required (by law) to honour those agreements as they were originally intended, to know their Treaty rights and responsibilities: “to live in peace, to share resources: some of the land, some of the wood, some of the ground so that they can live on and respect the land.” As I understand it, in territories where there are no Treaties, it is our role to understand what negotiations are in place and to ensure that sound agreements and good relations are made and upheld so that we can fulfill our historic commitments to the Indigenous Nations.

Stewart, who arrived in Edmonton in 2007 from Vancouver to join the faculty of the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta, composes a poem very much on the foundation that it is everyone’s responsibility to know and understand the treaties that make up so much of our country, and to know precisely what the settler responsibilities of those treaties actually are. In many ways, it feels as though this is the project that Stewart has been working on since she landed in Edmonton, attempting to fully and respectfully understand and engage the landscape upon which she has become a small part.

While immersed in this

Their patience has been exhausted

You are here

The enemy is ahead

Treaty 6 Deixis explores how to ethically exist in and engage with such a people and place. Where Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes turns archival settler language against itself in Dead White Men (Toronto ON: Coach House, 2017) [see my review of such here], or even the language of treaties in X (Gibson’s BC: Nightwood Editions, 2013), Stewart’s Treaty 6 Deixis writes more immediately of her surroundings, the space bound to and by Treaty 6. Constructed as an accumulation of short fragments with an endnote, her short, incredibly precise sketches are surrounded by an enormity of both silence and white space, pointing very deliberately with a strong finger; writing and pointing, here, here, even as her “Endnote” writes of the difficulty of this very writing:

Where is this when I say this where I am here when I am here How can I a

person of white settler descent engage in a living poetic practice that points

to this place How can I acknowledge my specific historical context and see

how that points to my obligations to these connections How to express my

connections within the context of my disconnections My love and my violence

How to honour my obligations as expressed in the spirit and intent of the

Treaty negotiatons How to understand what those obligations are How to

To further this, her afterword, “TREATY 6,” opens:

From you learn lean in toward point to side ways try to next to and only just conceive of the extent of these obligations and the connections those obligations have to this water drink to this air move through to these trees live under to that rock along your bank and to this river love

Upholding the Treaty 6 agreements is our responsibility It is work to restore the kinship systems and the balance that is necessary for all life How to account for all that is taken from this place locally globally the continued injury and displacements of people here and elsewhere How to become a good relation a good accomplice a useful conspirator to breathe with the complex communities of this place Here we are asked to learn the meaning of Treaty 6 itself as it was agreed to by the nêhiyaw Îyârhe Nakoda Dene and Saulteaux and not as it was later interpreted by the Crown am asked to understand that Treaty 6 was and is a necessary nations-to-nation negotiation That at this place here there was no surrender of land to the Crown that the treaty negotiations in 1876 were made with the understanding that land sharing and close kinship connections were possible and necessary That the nations-to-nation treaty proposed by the nations of the area with the Crown was (and still is) based on thousands of years of treaties that have existed between nations and that those human-to-human treaties are founded on the original treaties that exist between the human and the non-human or more-than-human world