two poems:

Hemingway floats,

            Now this old man

            has ripened sweetly.

                        Jane Munro, Blue Sonoma

A sextet tale of cats, domesticated. Sing: poly, poly. The sun sets and it rises, also. Made this day from earth. The body stands, like butter. Pounding, chest. Inside that loft, such Nobel composition. Studio, arranged. Head in hands in hands in hand. Tumbler, this knot of bone. Such contradiction: iron fireplace, this heat. Invention of the fur, the furl, paw telescopes. An extra claw. Sea-faring, doubtful mews. A line of craters, causes. Calm things, fathom. Christened. Pronoun, woman. Wife. A hard-back chair. Administers. What we might know of oracles. Penny function. His last red cent.

Arboretum

Every few days another moth appears.

Michael Lithgow, Waking in the Tree House

Meaning carries blood, an impact. Baby laughs. Her fingers lift a leaf, to mouth. Rose and Wren, entangled. Quoting: happenstance. Water, audience. The threat of rain. Angora: tension, pulled. Knelt down, sharpened. Gravity: a zero orbit. Tulips, disassemble. Sweep. Ornamental; tree-lined, narrative. An atmosphere. Sunrise. Flicker, fibre. Trembled. Somewhere, swings. The clouds were mountains. Woolen. My body is a conifer; my heart a sugar maple. As long as there are facts. Dappled, snow-stitched. Cut from whole cloth. Fly wheel, treadle, maidens. A wooden lift. Mother-of-all.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jane Munro

Jane Munro’s sixth poetry collection is Blue Sonoma (Brick Books, 2014). Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press, 2010), Point No Point (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books, 1995). Her work has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Macmillan Prize for Poetry, been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and is included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2013. She is a member of the collaborative group Yoko’s Dogs (http://yokosdogs.com/) whose first book, Whisk, was published by Pedlar Press in 2013. She lives in Vancouver. http://janemunro.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Daughters came out a long time ago: in 1982. I still like that book, and it was well received – it even got short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award. However, I don’t think it changed my life. Maybe having a book published always changes one’s life somehow. But, at the time, I was a single mother with three young children and a job. Finding time to write was a challenge.

As for comparing my most recent work, Blue Sonoma (Brick Books, 2014), with the previous book -- I think it’s a progression in tone, content and style from Active Pass (Pedlar Press, 2010).

In tone and content, Blue Sonoma is a tougher, sharper, book. At its heart is a partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s. While working on it, I realized that dementia could serve as a metaphor for the forgetfulness of society.

In style, its poems are open form, but there are ghosts of eastern “closed” forms of poetry. “Darkling” is a long poem composed of shorter ghazal-like poems. “Old Man Vacanas” are my adaptations of a 12th Century South Indian form.

By contrast, Active Pass explores connections among the visual arts, yogic discipline, and self-regeneration. It includes ghazals, loose sonnets, and open-form poems.

In both books, the witness’s journey is ghosted by her emotional and spiritual shadowboxing with her own life.

But there’s another way to answer your question. If you count Whisk by Yoko’s Dogs (Pedlar Press, 2013) as the previous book to Blue Sonoma, the contrast between books is even more pronounced. With Yoko’s Dogs (Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis, Jan Conn and Jane Munro), I'm writing collaboratively in the renga tradition. These linked verses eschew narrative and metaphor, both important in Blue Sonoma. And, Whisk is more playful than Blue Sonoma.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always loved poetry. And, as I said earlier, by the time I started writing seriously, I had three young children. Composing a poem was more doable than writing in a longer form.

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?
All of the above! It has really varied. But, generally, writing comes slowly and most projects require many drafts.

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?
Routinely, I’ve been a drafter of short pieces – I think of them as “protopoems” – and sometimes do one a day as a practice. They stay in my notebooks until I’ve forgotten about them. At some point, I go through the notes and pull out bits and pieces that catch my interest. I’ll type these up and slowly begin to work on poems. Gradually, a sense of the book will emerge and then I may work more deliberately on composing it and poems for it.

But this isn’t the only way poems begin for me. There are times when a poem, or even a sequence of poems, will just arrive. I’ve often found writing retreats very productive.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings. They’re definitely part of my creative process.

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?
Hopefully, the books themselves address the theoretical concerns behind their composition, as well as the questions I’m trying to answer in my work. Blue Sonoma is my most recent attempt to answer your questions.

I wouldn’t presume to speak for other writers about what the current questions might be for them.

That said, I don’t write in a vacuum. I read and listen and engage. I am now, and have been for a very long time, fascinated with the art and craft – the poetics – of what I’m doing, and what other writers are doing. I’m interested in the philosophical questions around writing. But these are huge topics!

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?
Jane Hirshfield says, “A good poem is a bit like a volcanic island. It creates new terrain for the soul.” In a volcano, the stuff coming up was previously hidden. Poems can make visible—and invite us to pay attention to—individual and social shadows. If Jung’s right and we need to agree to the whole experience to get a full life, then incorporating what was molten and unformed into a concentrated pattern of words gives us new ground—a place to explore, camp out, maybe even plant a garden. Oddly, though it may at first strike us as “new terrain,” we recognize and trust its reliability and its continuity with the rest of our experience: now that it’s there, it’s there.

I think this is also true about writing in other forms.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Who will ever read your work with more attention and engagement than a good editor? Having one is a great gift. Responding to an editor requires an equal level of attention and engagement from me, but that’s also a pleasure. I’m grateful for the pressure this process puts on the poems, and the way it makes weaknesses apparent. Then the question is, what to do about the issues raised.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Write as if you are already dead.

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?
This varies. Most days, I write. Some days, I spend many hours at the computer, but there’s also the rest of my life. Writing projects go through different stages. Some stages are more intensive and demanding than others. My days usually begin quietly. When possible, I like a rather meditative start.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Dreams. Reading. Walking. Yoga. Friends. Laughter. Art. I don’t know – whatever I feel I most need.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Now? Since I’ve moved back to Vancouver, I don’t have an immediate answer. But, during the twenty years I lived at Point No Point, once I got beyond Sooke, I could smell a change in the air. I woke up every morning to the fragrance of ocean and rain forest. Home was on the wild coast of the Island. It smelled fresh – air blown over waves across the Pacific, picking up the scent of lichen and spruce, cedar and hemlock, sword ferns, alder and moss.

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?
Again, all the above: books for sure, but also nature, music, science, films, visual art. Even yoga: I’m going back to India again this fall to study yoga. And, silence – if you count that as a form: silence and dreams.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is another huge question. I read eclectically and pretty steadily. Lots of writers and writings are now – or have been – important for me personally and important to my work. I can’t begin to cite them all, not even the recent ones.

15- What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Flamenco dancing?

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?
I might have been a visual artist. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Practicalities. I didn’t have time to both paint and to write. For many years, I had to put much of my energy into carrying on with the rest of my life. That’s not a complaint – but there were choices.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Blue Fox by Sjón

Off the Map (2005) directed by Campbell Scott

19 - What are you currently working on?
A prose narrative and poetry with Yoko’s Dogs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Yoko’s Dogs, Whisk

TEA CEREMONY

wipers sluice pollen

from the windshield—

tea ceremony

the porch lights up

bats return to the barn

moon my companion

on the road

heading home

in the house I left last night

people are brushing their teeth

I’m always intrigued by the notion of the poetic collaboration. When it’s done well, it manages to highlight a way of writing not individually possible by any of the writers involved. This new small collection, Whisk (St. John’s NF: Pedlar Press, 2013) is composed by “Yoko’s Dogs,” a writing group founded in 2006 by the Canadian poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro, each of whom have been producing their own individual works for some time. Given that the four of them might share the same writing space and space on the page, the narrative disconnect is one that anyone might expect, and their own individual more narrative works blend together into a form that might be seen as akin to the North American ghazal, or even the English forms of the haiku. In these poems, the four-become-one seem to favour highlighting narrative smallness, extending the small moments of the English-language haiku, and the tangentical leaps of the ghazal. Through these moments, the finest of the poems shine through, but when the lines attempt to connect too much on the narrative level is when the pieces break apart.

SMALL SONG

a cricket stops singing –

that really is Prince Andrei

home and alive

wren at the window

I move, it’s gone

the girl practices trumpet –

coyotes

in the canola

rain is my shower

I share a bed with field mice

Why fight to artificially connect what might be entirely impossible? It’s as though the collaborative fifth that is emerging from the mix is one that distrusts the narrative impulse, and yet, the group hasn’t yet learned to trust that voice, and their own intuition, instead fighting against the very thing they are attempting to create. The strength of the poems in this collection come through the disconnection itself, four voices merging into one, and through this, the best of the poems come. The tension between their own individual voices and that of the collaborative fifth is compelling, but that tension doesn’t necessarily make the best poems. Instead, it highlights the fact that this is a collaboration-in-progress, yet something that reads as far more lively than similar works by Pain-Not-Bread. The book reads as an interesting experiment, and one they should certainly further, but perhaps an idea that hasn’t quite solidified.

NOT AVERSE TO FLOWERING

the rambling rose

is not averse to flowering

among yellow leaves

Pearl gets her hair done once a week

at the salon downstairs

watch dog or barred owl

whuuu hu whoos

in the woods out back

misses the rabbit on the second try

that bobcat

Jane Munro, Active Pass

1.

We live where night seeps straight down—

wine on the wicks of stars.

A rock carved by waves and warmed by sun

that's easy to sit in. A lap. A body to lean on.

I'm a little deafened by the constant breaking

of the ocean. Change, change, change—

but what has it learned? Throwing itself against stones.

Rounding them up. Scotch bottle broken and rolling.

My father softened as beach glass—

ground down.

The first and title section of Vancouver Island poet Jane Munro's Active Pass (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2010), writes of the pass itself, with the twenty-one ghazal-section offering up the fact that “Midway on its crossing from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, the ferry enters Active Pass, a scenic but dangerous strait where visibility is limited, currents vigorous, and vessels alter course.” For the author of poetry collections Daughters (Fredericton NB: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1982), The Trees Just Moved Into A Season Of Other Shapes (Kingston ON: Quarry Press, 1986), Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (London ON: Brick Books, 1995) and Point No Point (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), I would say the sequence does just that, altering course, pitching and sailing into ghazal-turns, marking clear paths across a range of waters, and easily the strongest section in the collection as a whole. I'm always surprised the BC Ferries don't inspire more poems than they seem to, guilty of more than a few myself, scattered throughout various poetry collections over the years.

21

Going home with five plastic bags of chicken shit

for the garden we're starting from scratch.

Going home—up the gravel drive beyond street lights,

municipal water, or garbage collection.

Mother read Bahá'í texts while smoking on the toilet.

Toyota station wagon's my confessional.

After little islands, the big one. I can smell the Pacific.

Feel my cheek on your chest.

In three sections—“Active Pass,” “Mary Pratt: Illuminations” and “Nearer Prayer than Story”—Munro appears strongest and most effective with less description and more observation, letting the language of the pieces steer the course of sharp lines. And with so many pieces over the years of poets writing pieces on visual art, so much ground has already been covered that it becomes difficult to simply be capable, the “Mary Pratt: Illuminations” reminding of the poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, her “Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt,” winner of the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, and later included in The Golden Lotus (Netherlandic Press, 1993). Is it enough to simply describe? Munro does more than that, using Pratt's work to illuminate something further, but somehow, this seems a weaker section in an otherwise compelling lyric. Again, so many working currently within the lyric; just what else, I wonder, is the lyric capable of that we haven't yet seen, or even dealt with?

You have no name and no form

The old wear thin.

It's possible

to see through him

into the blue his eyes frame

and let into the room.

He's light now—

a garden rake left leaning

against a trestle table. “I'd have liked

a last conversation...”

He's taking long strides

with the wind across grassland, catching up

to a further figure—

his heart bounding ahead.

When his friend notices and turns to wave,

he waves back.

The rolling plain is dancing.