12 or 20 (second series) questions with Clint Burnham

Clint Burnham has lived in Vancouver since 1995.

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?

My first chapbooks were published by Lillian Necakov’s Surrealist Poets Gardening Assoc and Daniel Jones’ Streetcar editions – Lillian published The And that Cain Forgot and Jones did The Toronto Small Press Scene – both in 1990, the first was minimalist fiction, which I’ve continued to do up to my recent White Lie book from Anvil (2021) & the book of mine you just did (The Old Man: New Stories – 2024) and the second a critical account of local publishing. So there is a certain thru line – I continue to write fiction/poetry, mostly published with small(ish) presses like Coach House (back 20 years ago), Arsenal, Anvil, Book*hug; and I write criticism, mostly published by Canadian or international presses (in anthologies from McGill-Queen’s University Press, but also Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave).

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

Again, poetry/fiction AND criticism – at the same time, in the late 80s. For me, some of the poets that came out of TISH and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and from my generation, the KSW, emulated that “impossible” non-relation (as we say in Lacan-speak) between criticism and creativity, a scholar and a poet (but not a scholar-poet). A scholar-poet, in my reckoning, means either just a bougie lyric poet employed by the uni, OR the poems full of obvious or encoded versions of, say, one’s research on TS Eliot or Donne or The Iliad (or, just as bad, theory code words like “grammatology” or “affect”). But my origin story is that when I was in high school in Regina, Sask., in the late 1970s, I came across a bill bissett poem in an anthology, (“th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police”?), I started writing lower-case, phonetic poems, submitted a wack of them to a Sask. arts board manuscript service, can’t remember the response. My high school teacher at the time, Ruth Robillard, was amazing, also had me reading Camus & Ondaatje. John Newlove came to read – he was writer in residence at the Regina public library (78? 79?). I moved to Victoria in 1980, at military college for a year before getting the boot, then fell in with writers in the city and around the university, including Gail Harris, Clint Hutzulak, and the poet Stephen Scobie who also taught. Then Toronto, to go to grad school, in the late 1980s, when again, fell into the small press community there, which led to a few chapbooks already mentioned. After that it’s book books, in Toronto and then Vancouver.

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 start in the Notes app, usually. (I’m very ADHD so keep getting distracted, copy down things, forget to finish this question., come back to it months later):

Certainly for The Old Man: New Stories, the project of mine you just published (thanks rob!), but also The Goldberg Variations, my poetry collection due out this spring (2024) from New Star, that was the origin. Cutting & pasting from other texts to friends & vice versa (when some of the stories in Old Man first occurred/were written, I’d send them to friends by WhatsApp or Signal etc. For The Goldberg I took what were written in bold heading font for the Notes app, and then dropped them all into a Word file and kept the line breaks from the app (so, in media studies lingo, the “affordances,” what’s SOP), then started moving them around, first into sonnet like things of 7+7 12+2 or 8+6 blocks, which became strings for the first three poems (“No to a harm rinse,” “Wedding hi viz,” and “Passion waged” – this was being put together in Berlin in the summer of 2022 so “Wedding” refers to that neighborhood), then strings of 7x2line couplets (“History b’y” – or Newfie for History boy). “5.2 cop crows” was then just single lines separated, and the next two poems “Back-out drink” and “Looks aren’t” were written as one line per page, compressed for reasons of political economy. “No to Nato,” the next poem (title taken from Wedding graffiti) then had two 7 line columns: you can read across or down. This was roughly half-way thru the manuscript so then I started fucking shit up. “B.A.” (named for a character in the great social democratic 80s tv show The A-Team) was structured like that vile contribution of  Vancouverism, the podium and tower condo – so thin lines interspersed with fatter ones, indented (with a few that ran over the end, which I always like, so you get:

forced feeding scene, orderly flicking cigarette ash onto food
in funnel in hose in
nostril serves me right just took the damned documentary
film course

which takes a memory of revulsion watching Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies in a film course in the 1980s, and exceeds the page just as the visual described in the poem exceeded both the patient’s and my own bodies.

The poems that follow, “QUELNSEN” (historic centre of the Kòmoks people) strings up the various sonnet forms (7+7 12+2 or 8+6 blocks etc), “More likely a stroller” and “Cherry” are one-offs, “Coq. (pron. coke)” (as in Coquitlam or kwikwetlam) and “Frownlines get Marx-y” are working with the double columns (which, again, had much moving text around). Followed by “Naum Gabo!” both a gnarly Russian futurist whose cardboard structure I saw (still preserved, 100 years later, isn’t that crazy) and a song by Vancouver art-punks U-J3RKS, more futzing around with Vancouver condo-types, and finally “stéyəs LOSER” (the former an island in the Salish Sea, in the W̱SÁNEĆ language, the latter a 90s grunge ref., natch), where it all falls apart/comes together, take your pick.

NB re working from Notes app, that’s embedded in “5.2 cop crows”:

why if Nate
Mackey writes his poems in
his iPhone notes app is that
cool? and who remembers
Ho Tak Kai? but if I do it
just looks like thud? I mean this?

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 was asked about this but, continuing what I said above, don’t be too knowing. Or when you are too knowing, make that its own thing, so you’re not too knowing about being knowing. You never know what you’re doing in a work. Or when you think you do, you become one of those bloviators, telling you what their work means.

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?

This is a tough one, because I don’t like directly political writing or art, but I do think writing and art has a politics. For me, when it shows up in the work, it may be content, or it may be form. The use of quick commentaries or observations via my phone to the collection you published, that process, seems to me to be the politics of The Old Man. I find if I “intend” or “try” to write a political text, it fails. It has to nominate me, not the other way around. Or: the unconscious.

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

I love being edited. It’s very carnal.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard given to others?

I rarely send to places I don’t have a relationship with.

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

I really like Simon King’s TikTok on Northern Alberta. Lydia Davis’ Strangers. Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest. Just finishing Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A continuation of/sequel to White Lie, more super short stories. Now published by you!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;