Vincent Pagé has
had work published in Prism, Geist, The Malahat Review, Metatron,
Event, The Puritan, and Vallum,
among other journals. His first book is This is the Emergency Present, with Coach House Books. He
was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2015. He lives in Toronto.
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’ve been working on this book for the last 7
years, so I guess the biggest way having it published has changed my life is
the fact that it's no longer in my life. Or isn’t the focus of it at least.
Every line or idea or concept that came to mind would always be positioned
towards the book and whether or not it could live there. And now that it’s
finally printed and that I don’t have any other projects on the go, I can feel
its absence as something that was moving or growing or shifting.
Most of my previous works (two chapbooks,
publications here and there) are included in this collection, so its more composed
of them than compared to them.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t come to poetry first. I started out
writing truly terrible short stories for a number of years before I read a Jim Harrison poem and thought “that’s closer to what I want”.
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 good portion of the book and the chapbooks I have
published have had conceptual frameworks. Once those are set up or uncovered,
the writing actually happens quite fast to fill in the conceptual space I made
for the work. Then I edit and work on the poems over and over until someone
finally publishes them and they’re out of my hands. I’d say the oldest poems in
this book have been read and rewritten and edited around a hundred times and
look nothing like they did when they were first written.
4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
Poems for me all start from a single line that pops
in my head from just wandering around doing nothing. It’s rare that I’ll sit
and think “write” and then come up with anything good. I’ll have a line in my
head that is interesting, either phonetically or conceptually, then I’ll write
around that line trying to uncover what the rest of the poem has to say. If the
line can’t kind of create a poem from itself, it tends to find a home in a new
poem later on down the road.
With this book (and most firsts) it’s a kind of
hodgepodge of work. There are themes that were teased out by careful editing by
Karen Solie that then spurred some serious cutting of poems, but I never set
out with a grand theme in mind or the goal of necessarily putting everything I
wrote into a book.
5 - Are public readings part
of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys
doing readings?
They’re neither part of or counter to the creative
process. I’d say they’re absent really from the actual process of writing for
me. I enjoy readings enough but have been told I need to work on my small
talk.
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 never set out writing with any clearly defined
theoretical concerns driving the content of what comes out. I’m less trying to
answer questions and more trying to ask them as the poems come, but it would be
crazy to say that my work necessarily is asking any of the “Big” questions, or
anything more than the concern of what am I going to make for dinner tonight,
and how am I going to figure out something for dinner tomorrow, and how will I
spend a lifetime sorting out what to eat for dinner.
I certainly think there are some poets writing
books that are asking incredibly important questions about our culture, our
time and place, our society and how we relate to one another. I just don’t
think this book should necessarily be positioned as one of them.
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 mean, this is a question that probably has many
books and essays written about it and I don’t think I’m the person to or have
the capacity to articulate the right answer, but I do think the writer has a
place. And I think all I can say is that writing and books are a space for one
human to reach out to another, and if that reaching out is in any way
meaningful to anyone then there’s a place.
8 - Do you find the process
of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I worked with three editors. One was a
detriment and the others were Alana Wilcox and Karen Solie, who only
helped to make this book what it is. I could barely tell what I was saying
through all of the poems, but Karen could sense it and really pushed and cared
and I have her to thank for how solid it feels in my hands.
9 - What is the best piece
of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
That writing a poem is more of an uncovering of
something than a creating something. I think it was Dean Young. I think the
metaphor was about slowly digging up and brushing off a dinosaur fossil.
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?
My writing routine has shifted monthly ever since I
started. Sometimes I write all day, sometimes just in the morning, and more
recently, no writing at all.
I do find that when I’m reading more poetry I’m
writing more poetry. That’s probably the only constant.
11 - When your writing gets
stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
Poetry mostly. But recently I’ve found that one of
my greatest founts for creativity are those AI bots that try adapting the
english language and creating things completely on their own, like baking
recipes or film scripts. It feels like a child learning to speak and it breaks
the linear way I think with language. I find the mental space that exists after
reading goop from a robot opens up some new ways of interacting with
language.
There’s also a recent post I saw on Instagram where
someone took Smash Mouth’s “All Star” lyrics and translated them into Aramaic
using an online translator, and then back into English the same way, and it
really is more interesting than anything I’ve read recently.
12 - What fragrance reminds
you of home?
Lavender and musky closets.
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 really think if you’re a poet, everything
influences the work. But the poetry I tend to like these days is less
influenced by things like *Nature or *Music or *High Art but more influenced by
how shitty the TTC is, or how Instagram is sucking our brains out of our eyes
or how an experience on a dating app can be both the most gratifying and
loneliest thing in the city.
15 - What would you like to
do that you haven't yet done?
Ayahuasca, make a million dollars, spend a million
dollars, build a boat, do my taxes from last year, write a second book, turn
seventy, meet a celebrity and pretend I don’t know who they are, start a fire
by rubbing a stick into another stick, read everything Mary Ruefle has ever
written, write to Mary Ruefle, tell someone how I really feel, finish answering
this question.
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 don’t know many writers where writing is their
“occupation”. If I had to choose another hobby or creative practice that I’d
have committed the 10,000 hours to it might have been furniture building. I
can’t imagine how satisfying it must be to sit in a chair that you’ve hewn from
lumber and carved and cut and fitted perfectly for yourself or someone you care
about.
17 - What made you write,
as opposed to doing something else?
At first it was to be famous, because at first I
was young and stupid. And then it just became a necessity, like writing my
thoughts were the next logical step to thinking them.
18 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
Vincent Colistro’s chapbook Mountain Fountain Font that came out with Odourless Press this year
is easily the most fun thing I’ve read other than AI baking recipes.
19 - What are you currently
working on?
Nothing.
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