1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Over the course of more than a decade, this book has been part of my effort to change my life to be consistent with my commitment to remaking a world without capitalism and colonialism. I wrote the first draft of Un during a time of radical personal transformation, just after I resigned from a socialist group with a toxic internal culture. After that initial draft I focused on political activism, often to the detriment of writing. Now, more than 10 years later, Talon’s publishing of Un gave me an opportunity to re-engage the manuscript. For me, from the beginning of writing Un to its publication feels like the bookends of an important period of my life through which I have arrived at a more mature appreciation for the thinking-action of writing poetry.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I find myself uncomfortable with bracketing fiction – and maybe even non-fiction – as distinct from poetry. In high school I wrote and directed two plays. My Master’s degree is in history. For more than 20 years I have been writing and editing community, socialist journalism. A book of non-fiction political essays that I edited, and wrote, is coming out with ARP Books in the spring. For me, poetry is one part of an overall approach to writing and thinking, that which is concerned with problems of political theory that I can’t think through properly in essay form: the ambivalent, and the feeling of subject formation – aspects of social and historical life that are too in-motion to write about as decisively as an essay demands.
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 write single poems and poem fragments frequently, as notes. Then, when I come across an idea for a long poem I use those fragments as drafts – I find that I've been developing the long poem in pieces without knowing it, and then it comes together. When I wrote Un, the first draft came out in a burst, all at once, and then I added in fragments through the editing process that took a long time.
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?
Once I start working on a book, or long poem, I have that project clearly in mind, and other writing and thinking is steered towards it. I'm still a young writer, though not a young person, but at this point I have not ever published the short pieces or fragments I write along the way.
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, though I am still quite nervous about them. I have not done a lot of readings at this point, but those I have done since the publication of Un have changed my reading of the book. I have really enjoyed creating visual landscapes made up of photographs, photo art I made, and videos to pair with the readings. And while I always thought of the book as one long poem, planning readings has helped me think through the fragments and threads that run through that long poem. I look forward to doing readings as part of a process of testing and more completely understanding the poems I’m working on for my next project.
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?
At this point, the general question that motivates all my poetic writing is about the social construction of hegemonic and subaltern subjectivities through the global processes of capitalist production – to put it maybe too abstractly. What I mean is that I’m interested in the feelings people have about who they are in the world, and the dialectical connection between those feelings and how people act and what they believe. I am also concerned with this problem, the relationship between the subjective and the objective, in my political journalism and theory writing, but I find essays inadequate to dealing with problems of feeling. I think understanding the historical forces of feelings are important to an emancipatory political project because, as Italian communist Antonio Gramsci argues, at a certain intensity, feelings take on the density of material forces and act upon the world like other aspects of capitalist production.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Well – I think the “larger culture” needs to be understood as totally submerged in the depths of the ocean of global capitalist production. My view is that capitalism makes use of all intellectual production within its compass to reform, adapt, and perfect its socially reproductive spheres and processes – including and even especially critical intellectual and creative work. The more a writer plays an active role in that larger culture, the more they play a passive role in the rearticulation of bourgeois power.
In the past in the west, and today in other parts of the world, where capitalist civil society is not so totalizing, it was possible for writers to exercise commitment to counter hegemonic power. But this depends on the existence of counter hegemonies where writers can root themselves. I think writers and other creative producers can contribute a lot to the thinking, understanding, and development of those counter hegemonies. In the context of writing within a rapacious and always expanding imperialist culture, which is currently reaching to include, and thereby neutralize, the insurgent cultures and politics of Black and Indigenous peoples, a writer must be carefully attentive to the question of to which power they are contributing. For a working class white man writer like me, this is a thorny problem; the class character of the theatre I’m working in is not always clear. I want my work to contribute to the building of counter hegemonic power, developing the self-consciousness and critical capacities of subaltern groups, against white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In preparing the final manuscript of Un with Talon Books, I had the good fortune to work with Catriona Strang. I found working with her really helpful and generative. I don't think I'd be comfortable publishing anything without first collaborating with an outside editor!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
About writing itself, rather than the time-discipline surrounding the task of writing, I often think of the advice from Billy Crystal in Planes Trains and Automobiles: "writers write." It's a soundbite from pop culture that replays in my head. I like thinking of writing as a verb rather than an identity.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism)? What do you see as the appeal?
When I work in journalism for too long, two things happen. First, I start to use too much heavy metaphor in my journalism and it becomes too pretentious! And second, I find I start to get too mechanical in my thinking. Poetry, for me, is a method of thinking that is necessary to a more complete social investigation and understanding. I don't always find it easy to switch between them because they require a different pace, poetry takes a lower gear in the transmission of my brain, but that shift is necessary.
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?
These days I'm working two jobs and struggling to maintain a political practice of study and essay writing, as well as writing poetry. So I don't have a typical day. My ideal day would be to wake up, exercise, read for one hour, and then write for 2 hours – two days of writing essays and then one of writing poetry. But now I'm scheduling in writing blocks where I have time, after work before making dinner, and on days off.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I feel unable to write, I read and study. My best thinking is sparked by others and I find writing notes as I read theory and poetry to be the most inspiring space.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
It's been three months without rain in Vancouver, and this morning it rained for the first time. I realized that the most "home" smell for me is the scent of the wet cement after it has been dry.
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 love art generally. I played in punk bands for years when I was young. I grew up in the theatre and I have developed a real appreciation for film by going to, and recently starting to volunteer at The Cinematheque, an art house movie theatre in Vancouver. I also try to go to art galleries, though I feel like a real rookie with visual art. I find all art forms inspiring and challenging to my thinking about writing; I take a lot of notes and think actively through all art I can access.
And I think I am personally only at home in nature. For the last 6 years I lived in a cabin I built on a friend's property in Deroche, outside Mission. He sold the property this year so I lost the cabin, and thought I could just spend more time climbing mountains – which I also love doing. But I found I just can't live without it, so I'm now building a new cabin on another friend's property on the east side of Stave Lake.
I'd say these are my two critical inspirations. My writing is full of references to the arts and the land.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The most important writers for me are communist thinkers: Marx, Gramsci, and Lenin. I read and return to their work all the time.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In terms of writing, I'd like to write and stage a multi-voice performance of a long poem. I did direct and produce two plays when I was in high school, but not since and not in the world outside a high school theatre program!
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?
In terms of the arts, I wish I could have made films. But it feels out of reach to me, in terms of time, money, and resources, and I think I'm too old to start now.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have wanted to "be a writer" for as long as I can remember. When I was in my teens and twenties I thought I'd dedicate myself to writing once I had finished with the pressing work of travelling, playing music, and then, for the longest time, political activism. Eventually I realized that I was writing, and therefore a writer, all along.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
"Great" is an intimidating term! But the last book I read that I found challenging and inspiring was Axel Honneth, Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas. The most recent book of fiction I read that I really enjoyed was Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English.
The most recent film I saw that I thought was great was, Sambizanga, made in 1972 by Sarah Maldoror, a film about women in the Angolan revolution. I took my labour studies class to see it at The Cinematheque last week and thought it was an incredible document of struggle, and an inspiring community production.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I just submitted grant applications for the first time, for a new long poem provisionally titled: "Displacing Soviet Vancouver." I'm planning to compose a book of poetry based on archival research and interviews with my family members about the pan-Slavic diasporic community that was displaced by Vancouver's slum clearance program in the 1960s. I'm excited to work on a poem that is focused on the adjustment of subjectivities outside of but connected to my own, and through a deep historical study.
A very wonderful interview with Ivan. Enjoyed every word. I am going to buy UN his book of poetry
ReplyDeleteThank you very much.