12 or 20 (second series) questions with Hamish Ballantyne

Hamish Ballantyne is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. He has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab (Knife/Fork/Book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Auric Press, 2022) and published his first full-length Tomorrow is a Holiday (New Star) in 2024.

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?
The first chapbook came out in early 2020 and flew under the radar. My most recent work is more deliberate, for better or for worse.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to fiction and non-fiction before poetry—I wrote a lot of stories growing up. I also wrote non-fiction after a fashion—I used to write small books about animals, the weather, natural history that were 100% made-up. I only came to poetry in my teens, through my friends.
 
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?
It takes a long time to get going, a lot of attempts circling around the same idea, sound, word. Once I crack something, develop an unexpected phrase, then I can get to cruising where a lot of writing happens very quickly. Then the editing again is a slow process, trimming things and developing threads between different poems.

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?
I think more and more I find myself working on a book from the very beginning. I have a lot of ideas for books, execution is harder.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No I'm not, but it's getting easier. I do spend a lot of time thinking about how the poem sounds out loud, it's just that I don't think I'm the best reader. I'm working on that too.

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?
Yeah I think I do but I don't know if I can phrase them adequately outside of my writing. For one thing, I'm invested in the unscalability of poetry—the impossibility of extracting meanings from the full density of the text as it's written or read aloud. Poetry has an inbuilt resistance to the frictionless translatability demanded by late capital, and as such has huge potential to safeguard threatened histories, lifeways, idioms, sounds.

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?
There's clearly a lot of anxiety in Western liberal democracies right now about the role of the writer in culture, and I think it has a lot to do with the hunch that no one reads anymore, with a liberal insistence that the crises of late capitalism are actually a result of people failing to communicate properly and we need to bridge dialogue in our polarized societies etc. I've seen a few too many thinkpieces about empathy—I'm suspicious of those.  

I don't see any sort of privileged role for writers in the larger culture, but I think literary writing is important. Documenting histories, imagining futures and alternative presents, transgressing the boundaries of language etc. I am less concerned about the role of the writer and more about the role of writing in the culture—because as worried as people are about the crumbling institutions of literature, about changing modes of reception, about shrinking readership, writing—the inscription of language—remains dynamic and participatory.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like it! I haven't been to a writing workshop or class since high school, so working with Rob Manery on my most recent book was a nice/new experience.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One time we were driving down a logging road and a big rig came flying around the corner and my friend went halfway off a cliff trying to avoid getting hit. His van was kind of teetering there for a minute but the trucker hopped out, got some chains, and dragged it back on the road. The trucker (Walter) thought the whole thing was pretty funny and just said "keep 'er between the ditches" before he blasted off again. Good advice. But maybe the chestnut there is that if you almost kill someone you should at least drag them out of the ditch with chains.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
The two have a very close relationship for me. Translation is generative, it allows me to play and experiment more freely, because there's material there to work with, there are some parameters. The nothing of the white page can be pretty restrictive, I get stuck with what's easy for me. So in times where I'm not writing much or I don't have much going on in my head I'll turn to translation for a while to get the wheels turning.

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 read before work every day, to make sure that I do something on a workday that isn't just work. Then I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go so I can write on the bus or when I'm walking around. Essentially I try to absorb as much as I can, from as many sources as possible—and eventually something in the confluence of film-music-poetry-natural history-history-philosophy-novels-newspapers will congeal into a thought, and once I have about four or five thoughts that have been sitting in my notebook for a while the writing will start to take shape in my head as I walk around.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Writing that's familiar, people like Peter Culley, Philip Whalen, Hoa Nguyen, Roberto Bolaño. But also I turn to a less exacting form of reading, skimming big books I have lying around. And music, and movies: Pedro Almodovar, Lucrecia Martel, Mike Leigh. Recently I had a long day of no writing and watched a ten-minute documentary about a family in Louisiana that poaches rabbits as they get flushed out of the corn by the big agribusiness threshers. That opened the floodgates.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Creosote! Docks! Low tide!

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 think David W. McFadden is drawing a distinction between literature and life which we must strive to destroy at every instant!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writing of Michael Cavuto, Fan Wu, Tessa Bolsover, Tara Bigdeli, Cecily Nicholson, Dale Smith, Aime Cesaire, Cesar Vallejo, Fred Wah. Michael Taussig, Clarice Lispector, Gogol, Sergio Pitol.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Go to the Brooks Peninsula.

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?
I would love to work on an oyster farm.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always just liked the idea of stacking a bunch of papers I wrote on.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Secret Ladder by Wilson Harris. Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of poems about the speed of sound and gambling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Hamish Ballantyne, Tomorrow is a Holiday

 

practice instrument
practice    merest doing
the Holberg photograph is
as Julian never ceases saying a
return of the repressed as Julian
never ceases saying is an excess of
life the act preceded endless times
in a company town soon declared non-viable
awaiting showtime. AWAITING SHOWTIME
whether that’s annihilation of all practices
        or the moment to put your
into practice    until
performance at last denoted by
the um, tragic
then bacon it’ll
be as is our custom
for unexpected
  visitors (“Hansom”)

I’m intrigued by the quartet of sequences that make up Vancouver poet Hamish Ballantyne’s full-length poetry debut, Tomorrow is a Holiday (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2024), a title that follows his chapbooks Imitation Crab (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) and Blue Knight (Durham NC: Auric Press, 2022). Composed across the sequences “Hansom,” “Luthier,” “A&Ws” and “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK,” Tomorrow is a Holiday is, as the back cover offers, “a witness at the margins,” all of which provides a curious and amorphous shape to that absent, outlined centre. “a letter from jimmy buffett to / benjamin treating the form,” he writes, as part of the third sequence, “of appearance of movement arrested / in the billboards advertising / billboard space: a whale encounters / an enormous incarcerated krill in a submarine [.]” There’s a lustre of the Kootenay School of Writing language-infused work poetry across Ballantyne’s lyrics, one that acknowledges labour, even across the patina of holiday, comparable to recent works by Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here], Vancouver poet Rob Manery [see my review of his latest here], Winnipeg poet Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here], Windsor-based poet Louis Cabri [see my review of his latest here], Roger Farr [see my review of one of his latest here] or Vancouver poet Dorothy Trujillo Lusk [see my review of her latest here]. He speaks to the things around those things that are also around those things, writing rings around rings around that absent presence of centre.

what’s attempting escape when shaking
surprised by your own response
seized by something in the air
and the airs of the body
my brain contains insane architectures that compare
to the formation, timeliness, and cultural import of flying
crows in this part of the city
we must ask what’s in the box
who put it there and the box
there
we must ask why there’s a skeleton on a throne
not what he’d look like with skin (“A&Ws”)

The evolution and trajectory of “work poetry,” a term coined from within a 1970s British Columbia terrain of poets including Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, was one that emerged out of a focus on and acknowledgement of labour and labour issues through a relatively straightforward lyric. Other poets, interestingly enough, that moved through this cluster of poets included Erín Moure and Phil Hall. There are some that might forget that Wayman, and this work poetry ethos, was a co-founder of The Kootenay School of Writing, although this focus on a more straightforward lyric was one eventually jettisoned by those members of KSW that followed. Curiously, the attentions to labour became fused with the language-informed poetic that KSW would be known for (anyone interested in further conversations around the history of The Kootenay School of Writing should pick up either Michael Barnholden’s anthology around such or Clint Burnham’s critical work on same [see my review of such here]. Think of writing by Michael Barnholden, Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Christine Stewart, Deanna Ferguson or Judy Radul. Through an attention to a particular flavour of language and labout, Ballantyne’s Tomorrow is a Holiday, then, becomes not only one of the inheritors of this particular sequence of traditions, but an impressive feat in how one moves forward.

If some poems, some collections, give the appearance of including everything, then that is the space around which Ballantyne’s poems exist: focusing instead upon everything else, attending the minutae of side moments, sidebars and margins across a wide distance. As the sequence “A&Ws” continues: “As property grew they moved / forever to outside edge of the fence / even after they were out of sight / of bend in the river they / liked so much [.]” I’m fascinated by the poems in the final section, “ROCK ROCK CORN ROCK,” subtitled “Three Translations of San Juan de la Cruz.” Also known as Sant John of the Cross, the Spanish Priest and Mystic was born in Castile in 1542 and died in 1591, being one of the major figures in the Catholic Church for his writing, three sequences of which sit at the end of Ballantyne’s collection. Through Ballantyne’s translation, these meditatative sequences offer further ripples across his own “restless curiosity,” continuing an abstract conversation around a kind of moral authority on attention, being and being in and of the very moment, as the seventh of ten poems that make up the third and final sequence, “DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL,” reads:

porch light
night crouched low in the truck bed
church light
wife light
dream light (kid is or hitting
piano  swimming
pool
skinny horse
loved loved loved loved loved
(there are other
lights too)
via some grammatical weft suddenly
hear own pavement footsteps
I am in the dark
passing the store
passing the pet store

 

SOME : fifth issue,

 

place can over there  and I’ll drop the tree upon it
while over there fetch bbq sauce packets in glovebox

offset on white crescent of bucket’s innard part
between plastic lip and hump of mushroom silhouetted
to take spinning half cut up hwy to sell the PG
creep who refused to leave the mountain who after
an agreement in good faith reneged hence
the loaner red semi driven w scant warning
over his tents, baskets, dog, kitchen things,
against bucket innard eyelid shape
extends flickering shadow of a ribbon of piss (Hamish Ballantyne, “from Hansom”)

I like what Vancouver poet Rob Manery has been doing with his print journal SOME [see my review of the second issue here] and the fifth issue, dated Summer 2022, recently landed on my doorstep, featuring work by Hamish Ballantyne, Clint Burnham, Jeff Derksen, Lary Timewell and an excerpt of a collaborative work-in-progress between Elee Kraljii Gardiner and Chris Turnbull. There is something really valuable about any journal or publisher able to publish work by writers who don’t seem to publish that often in journals, if at all (Lary Timewell, for example), as well as being open to work that might be seen as too long or too experimental for even journals interested in that kind of work. Hamish Ballantyne [see my review of his latest here] is working a larger project through a sequence of fragments, each small section simultaneously offering another and a further perspective. “practice breeds a / constellation of attendant / practices each indivisible / from the instants of their expression,” he writes, further in the excerpt included here, “Later we / if we can find each other in town / decide what they all meant […].”

The intricate and precise layering of Gardiner and Turnbull’s collaborative “MESH” is stunning, offering folds of text wrapped across each other. They’ve a further collaboration in the October issue of Touch the Donkey I look forward to exploring as part of our interview. And as far as Timewell is concerned, it is well beyond the time when someone should be publishing a book by this poet; I know there’s an enormous amount of uncollected work he’s been sitting on, and he certainly deserves far better attention than he’s seen so far. His “Eight Poems” in this issue offer echoes and roots of his 1970s and 80s Vancouver KSW language-origins, but with an engagement in the interpersonal that runs across the foundation of his entire work.

reminiscent of natural animal pleasures

it’s not escapades in cascades
it’s not business as usual
it’s not an unlivable wager
it’s not captivated or decorated
it’s not spurts of pleasant to recall
it’s not learning to be a good loser
it’s not you never loved anyone but yourself
it’s neither happiness not lacking in happiness
it’s not at hand it’s not out of reach
it’s not the blue funk of a sports slump
it’s not favour me won’t you with just one more smile
it’s not picking the lock in your daydreams
it’s more like thinking sweet things of others even as you slowly die
it’s more like it’s nothing like that at all
it’s more like as probably many of you will already know
it’s more like i suppose you have all heard the incriminating rumours of
it’s more (isn’t it?) like your so-called life

There is an approach to accumulated language and political writing that both Burnham and Derksen engage with that sits in a similar realm to other current and former Kootenay School of Writing practitioners; their work reminds of a similar flavour to that of Winnipeg-based poet Colin Smith, for example [see my review of his latest here]. For those aware of any of his numerous collections, Derksen’s four poems here offer elements of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, including a prose piece, “On a Generation that Squandered its Future” (I can’t remember the last time I saw a Jeff Derksen poem set in prose” that begins: “I was working in a gas station, a greenhouse, in delivery, in gardening, / in editing, in teaching, in administration. The weather has a new name and it / is no longer Elizabeth.” The shift in patter, patterns, is curious, while still retaining the accumulative effect of the long thread, writing language across issues of labour and capitalism. Burnham’s piece is an extended poem with a curious title, “letter from Mount Pleasant to Manhattan (on Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Edge Books, 2008),” suggesting an enormous amount going on through this particular poem, accumulating some fifty to sixty stanzas of piled phrases collaged together to form something far larger, and far more complex. “before her if I have to spell,” he writes, early on in the poem, “it out for you thereby taking // the pamphlet from the / Western Front listing two / dozen Chinese restaurants / nearby now, twenty-odd / years later, I wonder / what the German / sisters are doing now are / they still perpetual / students or did they finish // their degrees and training, / work for a while in the Harz / mountain village their / family originated from […].” There are a lot of directions to grasp this poem, less threads than individual points, and it makes me curious to see this particular Kevin Davies title to get a better sense of how Derksen might be responding to that particular work. Further on, writing: “[…] who // remembers Lorem ipsum, / clip art, clip joints, I’ll / give you a clip on / the ear the / sound of small bits of / gravel and grit under / tires turning (but not rolling, if / you catch my drift) […].” Alternately, the first section of Derksen’s “Anonymous Fanon Poems,” reads:

That which is choking
you is also choking me

but its tight mesh
the police
the army
the state

is not from you

nor others
under a blight

and I will lose it last
following first after

you lose it

I don’t know who carries copies (ie: stores, etcetera), but the colophon writes that correspondence can be direct to: somepoetrymagazine@gmail.com and that “Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. E-transfers are welcome.” Also: note that the reading/launch listed here is in Vancouver, British Columbia.