Aaron Boothby is a settler poet of European ancestry from Riverside, California in the traditional lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Payomkawichum, and Yuhaaviatamand people. The author of Continent (McClelland & Stewart, 2023), as well as two chapbooks, he lives in primarily in Montréal, also called Tiohtià:ke by its caretakers, the Kanien:keha’ka people.
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 chapbook felt pretty natural to put together and I was lucky to have Klara du Plessis and Jim Johnstone as editors. They’re both very astute and respectful of what you’re trying to do as a poet in a way that was quite affirming at the time. I’m embarrassed by the rather awkward title, which I’ve been known to mix up myself, but it did set the tone for my work in many ways being longer form, fluid, and disinterested in contained poems. I like things spilling over and around. It’s an excessive work, and if there’s a big difference now it’s that I’ve learned to work against my own tendency to overwrite. I also presence myself more in the work, whereas before I actively obscured and took distance from the speaker. There was feedback from Dionne Brand then later Canisia Lubrin, the editor of my first full-length, that helped immensely in doing so.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve never been a competent or fluid storyteller, like do not ask me to tell a funny story! My humour is observational, spontaneous, and in many ways so is my poetry (which, sadly, is not funny). I’ve never been interested in motivations or characters or people in the way that tends to make fiction interesting. Anyway, I wasn’t drawn to it. Non-fiction would have been too easy, which sounds absurdly presumptuous and I’m sure someone will think, “Oh sure, write a good essay then!” but what I mean is it comes too easily, and I benefit from more resistance. Line by line, poetry makes you dig deeper, listen harder. I always feel like I can hide in paragraphs of prose, say any old shit and convince myself and maybe others there’s something valuable in there. Maybe there is! When I do write essays I certainly try. But I like that in poetry you can’t do that, not really. It’s like standing in a desert landscape, feeling wind wear down the phrases around you until necessary forms remain.. I adore the desert, obviously.
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 spend most of my time not writing, though I spent many years writing all the time. If I’m writing all the time I’ll feel like what I’m writing is different but it’s actually all the same. I need time and silence and reading to let whatever I write next become different. I have at least three full projects I’d like to actually finish and one I work on only when I can go outside and be with grasses. When I actually sit down to write everything moves quickly. I take notes and then ignore them. I used to write from fragments and stopped doing that. I have contradictions and un-interrogated habits. As for drafts, I rewrite a lot, sometimes drastically, and each is a different shape along the way. I’d say most of the time the core of the poem is already there and it’s a matter of getting rid of everything I’ve put in the way of it speaking.
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 phrase, a line, a sensation, maybe a kind of pleasurable irritation that doesn’t go away. I’m not always working on a book from the beginning, but poems seem to aggregate themselves pretty quickly into architectures with their own tones and shape.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They’ve certainly been a large part of my development as a writer, since without a regular reading series like Resonance, that Klara du Plessis ran for years, I’m not sure I’d be writing now and am completely sure I wouldn’t be writing the way I do or have made the relationships that sustain something as comparatively (to anything that makes money and even much art) marginal as poetry. I like readings, I’ve been going to more regular series and open mics lately, just to listen or chat with people who are often doing poetry more as hobby than vocation. I love to be reminded that people just get together to share poems sometimes and have a community around that.
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’m first of all a lazy poet, which sounds unserious, when I’m actually a bit serious about being lazy. I am curious about theory and get a lot from it, but what I get is tangled up in my own feelings and concerns, not a grounding of theory. I dabble, and anyone who actually adheres to anything would probably find it all messy and delinquent.. I really avoid any sense of having answers and don’t trust myself to have any. I’m also clear about things, like we live in ruinous landscapes populated by ghosts where we are intensely disconnected from each other and desperately need to listen, and be neighbourly in a way that goes against the whole capitalist-settler-colonialist apparatus of living we’re caught in. But that’s just happening, that’s not theory. Poetry is a way to imagine otherwise and perhaps how to do that is the question.
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?
I’m not sure there is one, to be honest, not in the larger culture. I think, outside of writers whose influence is directly tied to wealth, writers have a marginal influence. I’m not sure that’s bad, even if it’s materially bad for the idea of making a living from writing. I am personally more comfortable in the margins.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh absolutely essential, it’s way too hard to see everything I’m doing, especially since I don’t often really know what I’m doing! I mean I do, of course, but a practiced editorial eye is always going to catch things and a good editor will have suggestions that strengthen a poem or book immeasurably. I haven’t found it difficult, far more often delightful, abundant.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“It was always you who stopped you,” said by someone who knew me very well a long time before I really did, and it wasn’t intended as advice. It functions as advice because it’s accurate, I never forgot it, and it gets me to overrule my own hesitation when it comes to actually doing anything. Yes, I am an excellent procrastinator, it’s a way of life I do not disagree with! But reminders are helpful.
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 have something like a routine when I’m writing, which is pretty much a normal day of trying to read for a while in the morning and perhaps be outside for a while and then write in the afternoon, and another one when editing or more intensely rewriting, which is more like a free-for-all breakdown of routine and usually involves rather late nights where trying to get a line right evaporates hours at a time.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
It’s not an interesting answer, but reading, always. The writer Sofia Samatar put it as being a “pleasure animal,” when reading and I relate, it’s entirely tangled with thinking for me, and thinking with others is intimately tangled with any desire I ever have to write.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke, both from the seasonal fires familiar to living in California and the smell of creosote, a bush that flowers in the desert after monsoon rains, which is like oils mixed with petrichor.
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?
The artist Andy Goldsworthy might have as much influence on me as any poet, because otherwise I might think there’s no point in making anything when there’s the ripples on sand in dunes or near the sea, or water flowing across stone. I don’t really differentiate between forms, a position Goldsworthy also has come to late in his work, not differentiating between art and nature or civilization and nature, simply recognizing that we’re always in nature, and always working with those elements whether we recognize them or not. I am not a scholar of literature, let alone poetry, but to me the origins of any poetic form existing or future are in things like birdsong, the movement of shadows, the shape of stone, our voices and laughter when we walk through a city with each other. The music I like sounds a lot like these things too, and I find a lot of music by poets mentioning music in their work. Jason Sharp, who frequently collaborates with the poet Kaie Kellough, is making music that just floors me and I always want to write differently with.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is an enormous question so I’ll try to make it the shortest answer: Dionne Brand, Renee Gladman, Brandon Shimoda, John Keene, Zoe Todd, AM Kanngieser, Alice Notley
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
That’s such a dangerously open question! Visit Mexico City, touch the ephemeral lake that forms in Death Valley in some very rainy winters, participate in a poetry reading in California, because somehow I’ve never done that in the place I’m from.
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?
Field geologist or park ranger, the latter is still my backup plan. Give me a day outside and I’ll pick up garbage, I really don’t mind, it’s just nice to be out.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It wasn’t ever in conflict, really. I had an impulse to write and kept doing it, alongside doing other things. That’s still what I do. Mostly I do other things, even if I’m often thinking about writing in the background. I chose to pursue publishing and participating in literature as an event, but even that was mostly going with things as they happened. If things had gone otherwise I’d have done something else, maybe I would have met people really into sailing, or gardening, and done those things. Sometimes these questions are as much a matter of community as anything else, and writing has led me to many people I enjoy thinking with, talking with, making with, who do a variety of different things. If I had another art or profession, I think it would still be like that.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Tone, by Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar, and Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders.
19 - What are you currently working on?
A book in conversation with grasses and a mountain.
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