the banff notebook : , eleven days in may

In case you hadn't caught, I've been posting a series of missives from my time in Banff back in May over at my substack [I know I posted a little tiny at-the-time report on my Banff adventuring, but this is far more substantive], writing on days spent writing and reading, but also hanging out with such as J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Hiromi Goto, Jordan Abel, Adele Barclay, Sharanpal Ruprai, Conor Kerr, Derek Beaulieu, Joshua Whitehead and plenty of others, as I attempted to both be present within that space and group, and push the ends of a novel-in-progress. More posts in the sequence still to come, but catch the posts-so-far: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six and part seven. I also have a new short story posting at the substack later this week, and some cool essays forthcoming. Stay tuned!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adèle Barclay

Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in Vallum, The Heavy Feather Review, glitterMOB, The Pinch, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Puritan, PRISM international, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, (Nightwood, 2016) won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection of poetry, Renaissance Normcore, was recently published by Nightwood Editions. She was Arc Magazine's 2018-19 Poet in Residence and Canadian Women in Literary Arts 2016 Critic in Residence. She is an editor at Rahila's Ghost Press and the 2020 Writer in Residence at the University of the Fraser Valley

Adèle Barclay reads alongside Gabrielle Marceau, Ezinwanne Odozor and Ben Ladouceur in Ottawa on Thursday, March 26, 2020 as part of the tenth anniversary VERSeFest.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book changed my life utterly—If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You came out two weeks after I defended my PhD dissertation. It launched me from being a grad student to being a professional writer. That book opened my world and it was humbling to witness my poems have lives independent of me, to see them conjure meaningful sparks for some and provide ballasts for others.

Renaissance Normcore feels different because it’s a sophomore effort—I was coming to these poems from a more sure-footed vantage point and that emboldened me to play more cheekily with voice. This book differs in tone and diction—it’s more conversational and direct than If I Were. I worked with an intimate lyric in my first book but amidst surreal imagery and this more fantastical, shimmering emotional landscape. With Renaissance Normcore I wanted to play with the idea of a seemingly clear, bold voice with a few subtle lyrical flourishes. It’s still poetry and it was a fun challenge to harness the many voices of conversation and confession, the subtle flicks of wryness and sincerity.

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

When I was 6 I noticed my older sister Elissa (then 13) writing poetry and song lyrics in her journal. I wanted to be just like her and wield the power her mysterious lyrics and poems possessed. I began writing poetry and as I developed my writing it became even more surreal and coded because I knew my parents would be reading my journal. I was processing some very difficult experiences and poetry seemed like the only thing that could hold my reality.

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?

So far it’s taken me about 2 to 2.5 years to write a collection of poetry. When I write poems, I tend to write fairly quickly with the poem needing only a few minor edits. The poem either lands immediately or not, but what’s underpinning that poem could be weeks, months, and years of feeling and thought. I’ve written a poem in 20 minutes that was 5 years in the making. The time between writing each poem, however, can be short or long depending on how much time and space I can afford to devote to writing, reading and thinking.

The overall concept of the book  is something I am curious about as I write the poems and usually reflects the personal and cultural shifts moving through and around me. For example, Renaissance Normcore records the claiming of a direct voice in tandem with an emerging cultural dialogue around how we address or don’t address talking about power and trauma.

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 usually begins with a gut feeling in my body—something is up and I need language to grip as I ride the wave.

Since I started writing books I think more in book-length project, how a bundle of poems could speak to each other, how they echo and diverge. But I begin with the individual poems and each one discloses more about a bigger picture as I go.

I’ve also noticed each manuscript so far has its own colours, atmospheres, and soundtracks.

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

I love reading poems aloud. I feel myself and the poems come alive when I do public readings. Voice is so important to me and my poetry and readings allow me to wield the multiple and minute inflections, tones, and gestures of my work. I love how embodied reading aloud is. I also like giving very fresh poems some air so I can better understand the weight and texture of them.  

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?

How does the body carry language and vice versa? How do you heal from trauma as the world burns? How to make a poem that sounds like a queer femme singing about fear and desire? I don’t know if I can answer these, but I think of poetry as a place where I can carve out space to address the complexities and paradoxes of living with anguish and joy, loss and living.

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 like to think about how the poet sits at this weird intersection of cultural currency and very little actual currency. I think our relationship to clout and scarcity is odd and unique and tasks us with the responsibility of calling out this neoliberal nightmare we live in. In our poems we can imagine connections and worlds beyond our failing structures. I think the role of the writer is to gesture towards other ways of being and connecting.  

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

I love working with an editor! As someone who came up outside of the MFA system I am generally jazzed to see how my poems fare in the hands of someone else. It’s a gift to receive engagement, feedback and a perspective beyond my own.

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

WHERE ARE THE LOVE POEMS? –Brenda Shaughnessy to me upon discovering I was in love but not writing about it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Shifting between genres feels like shifting between gears for me—there can be a few creaks and jolts in the process. But I love writing critical prose and cultural journalism. I’ve written many review over the years and have been giving myself space to develop lyric essays so that I can spend more time with the questions poetry plops on my doorstep.

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?

I try to keep a routine as I work from home often. I freelance and sometimes teach and tend to have many gigs on the go at once. I begin my day with sharing breakfast and coffee (decaf for me) with my partner before we head out into our respective worlds. I often pick away at emails and admin tasks over the course of the morning and then move onto whatever I have on my plate—writing a poem, interviewing someone for an article, applying to a grant or residency, reading a book to review, editing someone else’s writing, drawing up the plans for a workshop—and multi-tasking into oblivion. When my eyes start to burn and I find myself spinning in circles I take a break in the late afternoon to do yoga or swim or go to the gym or run a small errand that entails walking. I try to wind things down in the evening to make dinner, spend time with friends, go to a reading, cuddle my cat, etc.

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

I return to reading—when the heft of my own writing is frustrating, it’s a relief to inhabit someone else’s perspective. And I also find it important to turn to some type of experience—walking, running, swimming—that reminds me I have a body.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Bleach and kitty litter.

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?

Music hugely influences my work—pop, grunge, 90s riot grrrl, jazz, Lana Del Rey, Tori Amos, Hole, Billie Holiday, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple—any musician that makes me feel things deeply and who I could also potentially write a dissertation on.

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

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

Attempt a stand-up comedy set.  

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?

A musicologist.

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

Writing is something I deeply enjoy even with all its vexations. I feel grounded when I hold onto words while everything around me feels like it’s shaking. And then the connective, conversational potential of writing is what brings me back for more—that my voice can go into the ether and can be absorbed and built upon by others is invigorating to me.

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

I just read The Undying by Anne Boyer—holy fuck. And I recently watched Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in theatres—double holy fuck.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of poetry, tentatively titled Libra Rising, on grief, ecological & personal, as well as a few lyric and cultural essays on a range of topics—such as concussions and PTSD, Tori Amos and online survivor forums that popped up in her name in the early 2000s, stealing lumber to build bookshelves—but loosely exploring how traumatized queer bodies come home to themselves and each other and/or how they sometimes don’t.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Adele Barclay, Renaissance Normcore

YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE BUT YOU DO

Would you rather be the sun or the moon?

Would you rather sing like Jenny Lewis

or Fiona Apple? I give you a box from Lithuania

and inside it wind and rain. And beside it

space for another box. This isn’t a nest

but a to-do list I vaguely mention

as if I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

The alarm will go off and I’ll sink

into resignation that light isn’t the ocean

but it almost is. I’ve replaced living

with swimming and reading Anaïs Nin.

I like when she shuts down Henry Miller

for correcting her English, trying to ply her

away from her diary. I read their letters

and imagine them both on Facebook Messenger—

all the dick pics he’d send; her, chatting up

several men at once and never recycling material.

Would you rather be blood or stone?

Would you rather receive or give a dick pic?

be moved or be the one doing the moving?

Between us a storm

and two completely different skies.

Vancouver poet Adele Barclay’s second full-length poetry collection is Renaissance Normcore (Nightwood Editions, 2019), following on the heels of her award-winning debut, If I Were in a Café I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood Editions, 2016). Renaissance Normcore is built as an assemblage of smart and even clever lyric narrative sketches that are savage and straightforward in their elegant observations on life and living, love and recollections, and as both portraits and self-portraits. Her poems articulate a series of stories and observations on small town coming-of-age and youthful folly, witticisms and survival. As the poem “SELF-PORTRAIT OF 2018” begins: “a swarm of construction-paper bats / gather dust in an apartment / I moved out of in May / and now my mail gathers / at the foot of a stairwell crowded / with broken bikes, a drum set, / bar stools, garbage bags / of clothes, suitcases, an empty keg [.]” Barclay writes on power, how it imbalances and occasionally overwhelms, and can also be twisted against itself. Hers is a lyric with fine purpose, and that purpose is to allow, and to give, but not give in. As she writes to open the poem “SUDDEN LANDSCAPE WITH INTERIOR JOT”:

God, falling in love

feels like waking too early

having to pee gazing slack-jawed

at a tall landscape—

meaning lives there,

is urgent, almost depends on it

Spotlight series #35 : Adèle Barclay

The thirty-fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert and South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner.

The whole series can be found online here.

30 under 30 : an anthology of Canadian millennial poets, ed. a.m. kozak

This anthology is filled with poets across the country who have their own unique experiences but are united in the context of time and space. Some are award-winners and major award nominees. Others are recently starting to perform and publish. When soliciting poets for this collection, we wanted to include a range of voices from various pockets of the country with special attention to poets part of the ‘scene’: the ef-fervescent community that takes relentless dedication, energy and care to build. Though we are all different, what keeps us strong is our togetherness.

Here is a little window into some of these ‘millennial’ poets, resisting through words, if you’re curious enough to peek. The next time you overhear someone characterizing this generation as spoiled or disinterested, just think—where’s the evidence? (a.m. kozak, “Foreword”)

I salute the ambition of Ottawa’s In/Words for producing the anthology 30 under 30 : an anthology of Canadian millennial poets (2017), a rare perfect-bound publications put together by the long-time chapbook and literary journal publisher. Edited by Ottawa poet and In/Words editor a.m. kozak (b. 1989) alongside “Editorial Team” Barâa Arar (b. 1997), Doug Dumais (b. 1994) and Justin Lam (b. 1994), the anthology features work by Trevor Abes, Adèle Barclay, Joelle Barron, Jessica Bebenek, Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Selina Boan, J.C. Bouchard, Emily Chou, Kayla Czaga, dalton derkson, Klara du Plessis, Claire Farley, Elise Marcella Godfrey, Kate Hargreaves, joseph ianni, Chris Johnson, Jessie Jones, Ben Ladouceur, Curtis LeBlanc, Julie Mannell, Ian Martin, Cassidy McFadzean, Patrick O’Reilly, Ashley Opheim, Jay Ritchie, Ellie Sawatzky, Bardia Sinaee, Mallory Tater, Chuqiao Yang and Adam Zachary. This is an impressive collection, although, in terms of design, I must say I’m distracted by the glossy pages and would have preferred better margins; poems shouldn’t feel squished, and I don’t want to have to crack the spine to be able to fully read the text.

Plastic Watermelon

Welcome the sky inside of you. Hold me closer in the tiny rain, baby, I have been wondering about the time zones of waiting and the phenology of watering.

Waking up inside of my self isn’t always beautiful, but waking up beside you is beautiful all the time. The pattern we make together is crystalline. Baby, the compost in the biodegradable bag in the plastic bin is a symphony of decay, and flowers are sometimes spaceships.

All beautiful things die, but think about the space between mountains anyways. Think about the space between breathing. I am a woman for you, baby. I am your gigantic earthly delight.

Come rage, come uncertainty. Baby, brilliantly. Come, avoid the ambient watermelon. It is too heavy. Hold me in the gentle rain with certainty. Hold this time zone of waiting.

Together we make a watering mouth. Together we wonder about the pattern between mountains and the smallest crystals. I am gigantic for you. I am a tiny spaceship. I am waking up beside you in certainty, baby.

I am wandering between the time zones of our longing. I have been a watermelon seed. I have wilted. I have decayed, for you, baby. I am new. I have been waking up as beautiful as wondering.

Love is the space between mountains that holds distance together. Love is a watermelon smashed on the sidewalk. I have been waking up as open as the sky for you, baby. I am all guts and seeds and rain. (Ashley Opheim)

There are a number of poets in this anthology whose work I’ve been excited about for some time—including Bebenek, Czaga, du Plessis, Farley, Hargreaves, Johnson, Ladouceur and Yang—including a couple I didn’t realize were still not yet thirty years old. Others in the anthology are new to my attention, and I’d been curious to see who In/Words might have selected (on first glance, Ottawa poet Sarah MacDonnell becomes a curious omission, especially given In/Words recently produced her debut chapbook).

Pushing the point of age, the book is sectioned by birth year, opening with “b. 1987,” a structure about as arbitrary as any (including alphabetical), but is intriguing in that this is something I’ve not seen anthology do before. Does age matter? I like that, here, it both does and doesn’t. Still, part of the limitations of such an anthology become clear pretty quickly; in the introduction, kozak references an idea of resistance, a social and political awareness, that his generation has embraced, yet the work in the anthology doesn’t really show much evidence of overt resistance, including those working within radical forms as part of their their resistance (as many older-than-thirty Canadian poets have been doing for some time: Stephen Collis, Christine Leclerc, Sonnet L’Abbé, Cecily Nicholson, Aisha Sasha John, Donato Mancini, Liz Howard, derek beaulieu, Brecken Hancock, George Elliott Clarke, Jordan Abel, Colin Smith, etcetera). As part of this, one notices through the author biographies that, once the list of contributors move beyond the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal range, they predominantly seem to be poets with contributor’s notes that include Arc Poetry Magazine and/or PRISM International. While this isn’t meant as a complaint against the anthology or the work of the editor, it does seem a limitation of structure and style in the collection. Were there no poets under thirty from Calgary, for example, working more radical forms? Or Vancouver, doing the same?

Nemieiben Road

we’ll dock the boat after late night skinny

dips and scar our legs, pummel lichen,

slip and fall into animal burrows, mark

our palms with pine needles, weeds paddle

blisters and beer bc up north it’s only

you me the ghosts and trees and

your white picket family, who’ll insist I

come back soon, indulge me with hot dogs

those red skins cracking all the towels and

all the books somehow I got through war

and peace without remembering a thing

and your brother will drive us back

through la ronge and we’ll see two native

boys running through the rain fists clenched

around garbage bags full of clothes brown

bra spilling not even November yet but one

of them made rouge lips out of a poppy

red velvet smeared across window

cocking his head to see what chased him

past the mud the rain and dirt the weight

of the crucifix hanging around his neck

your brother cackling to a halt gravel

road upturned pilfering folds of black

plastic frills of a dress peeking out

we were all laughing at those nobodies

driving out the city past tombstones

those gray tongues wagging at trucks

trampling infants clothing, we’ll

tell the story of them holding a funeral

wreath, those pebbles slicing cheeks

that rain and them crying and screaming

and arguing to get the dresses back

in the bag, we’ll get a postcard of

this ghost town for all the world

to see before forest fires torched

it all in 2015 that was a good time

to be alive, nemeiben road on fire

two townies hoodwinked by such

a nice family, pine needles burning

footprints of our interruption sinking

but who cares because who knows

about their history, and how little

we knew of everything. (Chuqiao Yang)

What also becomes curious is the fact, even, that another publisher or editor hadn’t already taken such a project on, providing a really interesting opportunity for In/Words; my generation, for example, had a pretty good amount of coverage (slanted towards more formally conservative work, obviously) through Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s two anthologies of “best” new poets under thirty—Breathing Fire (Harbour Publishing, 1996) and Breathing Fire 2 (Harbour Publishing, 2004)—prompting Jon Paul Fiorentino’s chapbook anthology-in-response, Pissing Ice: An Anthology of “New” Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004). Such projects are healthy for the sake of a living and ever-expanding literary culture, although I do wonder about some exclusions, which are, of course, difficult to really explore without knowing how old certain authors actually are. How old is Calgary poet Kyle Flemmer, for example, or Toronto poets Emily Iszak or Eric Shmaltz? What of Emily Ursuliak? Who else might they have missed? But still: the argument of exclusions become rather arbitrary when one considers the potential scope of their project: even the first Breathing Fire anthology took months of submissions to put itself together, and the final product was considered woefully slanted and incomplete (again, due in part to the lack of more experimental and radical forms of writing).

All in all, the work presented in the collection is intriguing, if a bit uneven; even poets I had been excited to read had poetry included that I know doesn’t represent their finest work. The wisdom and saving grace of 30 under 30 is their lack of declaration of arbitrary and impossible “best,” but instead, a showcasing of thirty Canadian poets under thirty that are simply worth paying attention to: in that, I completely agree.