The Rusty Toque interview with Jon Paul Fiorentino

I interviewed Montreal writer Jon Paul Fiorentino recently on his new collection of short stories, I'm Not Scared of You or Anything (Anvil, 2014), newly posted online at The Rusty Toque.

Language Matters: Interviews with 22 Quebec Poets, eds. Carolyn Marie Souaid and Endre Farkas

God knows the creative process is a mystery. To make something out of nothing, to see a world in a blank page, to hear imagined people speak, to touch things that aren’t there, to taste what is not yet baked, to speak volumes or write an image is something to wonder at, something awesome to behold. Yet these are the things that artists do every day. These are the tasks, pleasures and pains that artists, including poets, undertake. Transmitters of acts of the imagination, poets use language to make their unique works of art. But how do they do this?

            This is one of the many questions we asked Quebec’s English-language poets over the four-year lifespan of the online literary magazine that we, along with Elias Letelier, founded on June 24, 2009, Quebec’s Fête Nationale. We were curious about their process but we also wondered whether living in Quebec and writing in the language of “les autres” meant anything aesthetically, socially, culturally and politically. We had a poetic and political agenda. Poetry Quebec, or PQ, was a conscious and deliberate nod (and wink) to Quebec’s separatist party, the Parti Québécois. We wanted through our tongue-in-cheek name and motto, “Je me sousviens,” to signal that Quebec’s English-language poets are Quebec poets who were, are and will be here to remember and be remembered. The name and motto were also a manifesto of our engagement.

There is something very familiar in the framing of the new collection Language Matters: Interviews with 22 QuebecPoets, eds. Carolyn Marie Souaid and Endre Farkas (Winnipeg MB: Signature Editions, 2013). The press release begins:

Is writing in English in Quebec a political act? An act of survival? An act of defiance? An act of futility? An act of celebration? For answers to these questions, look no further than Language Matters, a series of candid interviews with some of Quebec’s – Canada’s – most interesting and innovative poets, which launched on Tuesday, September 10, 2013. These are poets who write in the dominant language of North America, but are the linguistic minority in a francophone culture – a minority within a minority. Living in the birthplace of Canadian poetry that gave rise to A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen, how do these poets view themselves and their already marginalized art?

There is something familiar here, and even curious: but for the date mentioned within, this blurb could easily be included on the back cover of a similar collection of essays twenty, or even forty years earlier. Have the questions really not changed during that period (or for that matter, the poets one might cite as precursors?)? As someone who grew up just on the other side of the Quebec border, I’ve a curiosity about such questions of landscape and geography, and wonder if there should be further questions in other regions that should also be repeated to the writers within, to allow a different perspective on other types of geographies, their politics, language and considerations of local space. Over the years, co-editor Endre Farkas has worked tirelessly to promote, encourage and explore English-language poetry in Montreal specifically and Quebec and the rest of Canada generally, through his work as one of the original Vehicule Poets in the 1970s (the group that helped give rise to Vehicule Press, where he was one of the founding editors) to later founding The Muses’ Company in 1980, to editing, co-editing and/or contributing to anthologies such as 10 Montreal Poets at the Cegeps (Montreal QC: Delta, 1975), Montreal English Poetry of the Seventies (Montreal QC: Vehicule press, 1977), Vehicule Poets (Montreal QC: Maker Press, 1979), CrossCut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry (Vehicule Press, 1982), Canadian Poetry Now (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1984), Voix Off (Toronto ON: Guernica, 1985), The Other Language: English Poetry of Montreal (The Muses’ Co., 1989) and Quebec Suite: Poems for and about Quebec (Winnipeg MB: The Muses’ Co., 1998). Farkas has spent decades working as an English-language poet in a geography and political landscape where he has been very much part of the minority, and through such, his efforts have allowed certain writers to become known and even flourish where they might not have otherwise had the same opportunities. But the question of the book becomes: have the questions one poses to writers in such a landscape really not changed over the years? It’s as though the framing of the collection doesn’t give nearly enough credit to the scope of the book’s content, and the engagement each author has with questions goes far beyond those suggested on the cover. When asked “Would you say that writing in English in Quebec [is] a political act?” in her interview, Erin Moure answers:

Not necessarily. Writing is always a political act, of course. Writing in English is not devoid of politics, for sure, in terms of the conditions of production and reception for that hegemonic language in the world. Writing in English in Quebec is also subject to conditions of writing in a society that speaks French. So there are political consequences, and social consequences, to writing in English in Quebec. Yet the act of writing in English, picking up a pen and writing, is not necessarily a “political act” for me, who grew up in English in Alberta. The act of writing in English and including French directly in the poem is a political act, though. The act of writing and speaking in Galician is a political act.

Originally conducted to be posted on their online Poetry Quebec (a website that arrived with much enthusiasm, but seems to have disappeared), the collection includes a selection of a series of interviews conducted over four years with poets Stephanie Bolster, Mark Abley, Erin Moure, David McGimpsey, Mary di Michele, Gabe Foreman, Catherine Kidd, Richard Sommer, Maxianne Berger, Steve Luxton, Robyn Sarah, Mahamud Siad Togane, Susan Gillis, Brian Campbell, Charlotte Hussey, kaie kellough, Moe Clark, Jason Camlot, Gillian Sze and Angela Leuck as well as interviews with the editors, Farkas and Souaid, themselves. The interviews (each including a poem or two by the interviewed poet) connect through a common concern with the intricacies of language (including multiple languages), and each speak of their engagements with Quebec writing, writers and the immediate landscapes in which they live. As Susan Gillis says in the space of her interview, “Living in English in Quebec is a political act.” She continues:

History and culture are living continuities. Writing and working and living in a minority language create an active engagement with those living continuities, a kind of claim-staking: Look, here’s my little corner of history and culture, alive and well and kicking. Not threatening, just being. I suppose for some Quebec nationalists, any other culture’s activity is threatening? Or the very notion of “just being” is false? I don’t see my work or myself that way, but that doesn’t mean others might not.

Originally from Calgary, Montreal-based “word-sound systemizer” kaie kellough provides an interesting perspective:

for an english writer, provincial boundaries dissolve. the nice thing abt writing & performing is that it can travel. if english writers were restricted to publishing & presenting their works in québec alone, then i might feel that working in english is a political act. but english writers can publish throughout north america: the markets for our work are much larger than the markets for french work. when my first book was published, it was launched in vancouver, ottawa, toronto, and montréal. further, i was eventually invited to read across the country - in halifax, calgary, gabriola (bc), saskatooooon, etc. [...] a french-language poet might get to launch a first volume in montréal, ottawa, and québec city, if lucky.

What does it mean to be an English-language Montreal writer, or more broadly, an English-language writer in Quebec? For some the question is essential, and for others, the question is a curiosity, nearly in passing. For some writers, these questions might be entirely irrelevant to the ways in which they write. Thanks to editors Farkas and Souaid, the question allows the answers to showcase the ways in which the landscape has shifted over the years, and just how much has remained the same. I’d be curious to hear others respond to these questions, such as Montreal-based writers Sina Queyras, Jon Paul Fiorentino and SusanElmslie, as well as some of the younger writers slowly emerging in the city, such as Helen Hajnoczky and Kirya Marchand. This is very much a collection built originally not as a book, but as a series of online one-offs which, when collected, might show the occasional gap or two. One hopes that further work, and/or a second volume might be down the road?

Jon Paul Fiorentino, Needs Improvement

WICKED ELOQUENT

Because poetry is very, very far from –

and those who therefore thrive insist it remain so

And also contemplative drones drone

inside cabailist cocooneries

Not to mention domain names reserved for only the most

wicked eloquent –

Plus flaccid fraternities with their

heightened-flaccidity-as-aesthetic-mandate flail, swing

Most meritorious solder wand weld torch trophy crooners

croon the comments, the walls, avoid the wells

And wasn’t this ambition supposed to be in the writing, not in the

product? In tenor and vehicle and not in laurel and mantle?

Fuck me. I’m as flail as anyone

Montreal writer and Winnipeg ex-pat Jon Paul Fiorentino continues his persona of the ‘beta male’ (although far softer here than in previous works) through his sixth trade poetry collection, Needs Improvement (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013), from the cover image of a mediocre report card (including subjects “trope,” “imagery” and “self-regulation”) to the subtle thread that stitches his lyrics and post-lyrics together into an extremely tight and taut collection. Fiorentino’s poetry is thick with references to misspent youth, the City of Winnipeg, recreational pharmaceuticals, clinical depression, Montreal and juvenile humour, and his poetry has evolved over the years into an impressive staggered and studied post-language lyric. Over the stretch of more than half a dozen trade titles – including two works of fiction, and previous poetry collections Indexical Elegies (Coach House Books, 2010), The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006), Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004), resume drowning (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2002) and transcona fragments (Winnipeg MB: Cyclops Press, 2002), as well as the chapbook hover (Winnipeg MB: Staccato chapbooks, 2000) – Fiorentino has learned to play his combination of dark and flippant tone as less of an overpowering force than a simple and subtle distraction that actually masks his movement into entirely different subject matter. I find it interesting that Fiorentino’s poetry has evolved into more conceptual veins, including the “pedagogical interventions” in the title section; utilizing manual illustration, satire, appropriation and manipulation, Fiorentino has widely expanded his ouvre far beyond the once-core of his work in the prairie long poem, and managed to craft questions far more important than the answers.

The visual poems he includes are reminiscent slightly of those by former Vancouver poet Jason Le Heup a decade or so back, as well as other works through and around the Toronto Research Group (bpNichol and Steve McCaffery), and blend perfectly with the rest of the collection [see an example of such here]. Composing poems both lyric and visual, the poems in Needs Improvement attempt to explore, explain and even obscure theory, and even opens with a quote by Judith Butler: “Neither the Austinian promise nor the Althusserian prayer require a pre-existing mental state to ‘perform’ in the way that they do.”

MINIMAL PAIR: SIMPLETONS

When I said we made a minimal pair

I was deep in linguistic conceit

It had nothing to do with your character

it was strictly labio-dental

Some of the poems in this collection previously appeared as the chapbook The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company (Calgary AB: NO Press, August 2012), including works that focused on mythmaking and geography, working over, across and through his hometown of Winnipeg, as he does more specifically in the title poem to the chapbook, included here as well:

The title of “Winnipeg Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it stores?

In the colophon of the chapbook, he wrote that “The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated with the most love from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performance by Judith Butler.” Composing poems as lyric-fragments of losing, loss and disappearance, as well as a section of report cards exploring bullying through satire, Fiorentino manages to turn information against itself, even to the point of working to say nothing at all.

TRINITY BELLWOODS

Down to my last

lyric

Do you know the word pilling?

It’s a piling on of fabrications

You wear it well or

wore it

Free-range derangement commences

as denizens make strange with tenses and moods

I saw an old cancerous friend here

who said, ‘I remember when I used to be creative –

They cut it out of me

all interstitial-like’

Now, the lies and years are

piling/pilling

I will miss you when you shun me. I write these

things for nothing

You remain

the best nothing I know

New American Writing: Canadian section

Ten Canadian Poets

►◄

edited by rob mclennan

: Rob Budde
: Stephen Cain
: Margaret Christakos
: Trisia Eddy
: Jon Paul Fiorentino
: Phil Hall
: Marilyn Irwin
: Meredith Quartermain
: Nicole Markotić
: Andy Weaver


The thirty-first volume of the poetry annual New American Writing is now available, with a section of “Ten Canadian Poets” edited by yours truly, following on the heels of other selections of Canadian poetry I’ve attempted to showcase outside our borders, including the Canadian issue of Swiss online pdf journal dusie, or the three sections I edited for Jacket magazine (on Douglas Barbour, on George Bowering and on new Canadian poetries), as well as a thread that exists in the midst of the new “Tuesday poem” feature I’ve been curating, over at the dusie blog. I’ve actually been wanting to edit an anthology of twenty-four Canadian poets for a non-Canadian publisher for years, but haven’t yet managed to convince a publisher.

When soliciting for this small section of “New Canadian Writing,” I attempted a cross-section of some of the writers I’ve been keeping my eye on, the ones from various corners of the country that excite me. They range from the well-established to the other end of emerging; they range from the experimental to the more lyric narrative. The differences between our two countries are small, stark, obvious, nebulous and often impossible to articulate. There is no single difference. We look and sound like you, but after a while, subtle difference come up, that you hadn’t quite noticed before.

There have certainly been improvements over the past decade, but on the whole, writing doesn’t cross the Canadian/American border easily, and most international publishers that produce poetry works don’t often publish the works of Canadians, leaving us aware of works by American, British and other international writers, but predominantly as a one-way system. Online journals such as Jacket magazine, Jacket2 and Lemonhound have certainly worked to improve the conversations between countries, as well as the Canadian poets now with author pages on the American Electronic Poetry Center website, but there is always room for improvement. I hope that this small engagement might provide some further interest in what some truly amazing Canadian poets have been up to, lately.

Thanks so much to Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff for allowing me this space in their journal.

Ongoing notes: late October, 2012

We’re back from the honeymoon, but still in the midst of post-wedding/honeymoon glow. Or is that merely hangover? In any case, we both attempt to re-enter the world, whatever that might bring. There might be photos soon, but god knows when. We have over a thousand to sift through.

In case you didn’t see it, here’s a photo of our wedding cake: Christine’s Conflict on the one side, and my Glengarry on the other, brilliantly made by The Cake Whisperer. Pretty damned impressive. And yes, it was an actual, real cake (we finished the last of it the other night).

Disappointed to see that Snare Books is no longer living the life of an independent press (see Fiorentino's official statement here), becoming instead an imprint of Invisible Publishing. Disappointed, but better they remain in some form that produces books than disappears altogether. When they first started publishing, they were full of vim and noise, and produced some very worthy books. Long live Snare! And then, of course, that more recent news about Douglas & McIntyre...

Also: Cameron Anstee did the most magnificent post the other day on Raymond Souster. Everyone should read it.

Note the number of events on the immediate right, at the top: a couple of events through The Factory Reading Series (November 15 and November 16, as well as a December 15 event TBA and the annual Peter F Yacht Club Christmas party/reading/regatta on December 29) and the ottawa small press book fair, among other things. Keep an eye out, as there are most likely more events to come over the next couple of months. And did you see that two above/ground press titles made the bpNichol Chapbook Award shortlist...?

Montreal QC: In my hands recently comes another publication by Calgary’s NO Press, The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company by Montreal-based Jon Paul Fiorentino, released in an edition of 75 copies in August, 2012. In Fiorentino’s small offering, he continues his fascination with mythmaking and geography, working over, across and through his hometown of Winnipeg, as he does more specifically in the title poem:

The title of “Winnipeg Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it stores?

In the colophon of the small book, he writes that “The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated with the most love from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performance by Judith Butler.” There are some intriguing visual pieces in the collection as well, and Fiorentino delights in playing with the modes and structures of others, including education and academia, but it’s the title poem that really stands out, and I’m curious to know how much he borrowed from the Judith Butler text. It makes me curious to see what and where these poems might appear next, and what kind of book-length work this work teases us for. Just where is Fiorentino going?

The question of whether citizenship requires the repression of Winnipeg is not new, but the recent efforts to regulate the self-storage of citizenship within Winnipeg repose this question in a different light. After all, Winnipeggers enjoy some of the rights and obligations of citizenship, but not all of them.

London ON: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Colbourne, Ontario poet, visual artist and curator Gil McElroy, so am extremely pleased to see the chapbook Ordinary Time: The Merton Lake Propers (London ON: Baseline Press, 2012). As McElroy writes on the acknowledgments: “The Merton Lake poem sequence of Ordinary Time was inspired by the invitation of poet Dan Waber to participate in a project in which a number of writers were asked to create a daily journal entry for the month of November, 2012 which he then published on-line.” The poem itself, a series of excerpts from a much longer sequence, opens with two important pieces of information:

ORDINARY TIME—the parts of the liturgical year

that do not fall in one of the seasons of Advent,

Christmas, Lent, or Easter

PROPER—designating a service, psalm, lesson, etc.,

specially appointed for a particular day or season

For those unaware of McElroy’s writing, this small work ties immediately into his poetry collection, Ordinary Time (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), his fourth trade poetry collection, all of which have appeared with Vancouver’s Talonbooks. Time is an essential part of McElroy’s writing, ranging from the cosmic (including an astrological sense of asteroids, constellations and shooting starts) to more human considerations, such as his ongoing “Some Julian Days” sequence that use dates from the Julian Calendar. Time is what he centres the entirety of his work around, highlighting the mundane day to day as magical by turning it slightly, altering its perception.

Proper 30

S

Bar all terrible saints. Steep them in the storm. There will be a wind. There will be something marvellous half-buried in the south – & unexpected. There will be combat, after all. Ridge directions stare down at an even place & the dry moments forming there. Though out three simple glances. Was a bit dizzy at the bad taste left in my mouth. Thought them out again. Chewed them splendid. Then cut them back.

Rainy boots. Nothing thought of while some news resolved. Probably hopeless. Lively ideas feel me, of course. “Hope so,” I said at the end, so pious & anathema, me. It all strikes me dutiful & such. The morning is competent with sermons dug up for everything. All that, and no doubt then. One gets between symbols, & then kapow!

By night, of course. But enough light dawned. Brick winds large around everything. The road out of places. A couple of thousand snowy silences along the way talking.

The wilderness terribly becomes, now. Sick of it. Mornings I wake up of it. Heavy rain in back of it. It will be too late of it. The lake of of it. I did not return to the right, getting back of it. Each remembered dream let go of it. Really lamentable, but purely mechanical. The 20^th century gone astray of it. Very, perhaps. I cannot be sure.

Edmonton AB: For some time now, Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour has been working a sequence of jazz-related poems under the title “Recording Dates” (including the poem “Jane Bunnett plays the Yardbird Suite,” produced as an above/ground press broadside back in September, 2002). Newly out from Jenna Butler’s Rubicon Press is Barbour’s chapbook Recording Dates (2012), a selection of some of these pieces.

October 9 & 10 1974:

Death comes in many guises, a black bird

and a white whale equally partake of the great,

the intense and final prayer,

flower of the atom, atomy of the flower.

Prayer is both response to and refusal of the

great journey now begun, whale and

bird both taking the shortest route possible to death.

Of all the books that Rubicon has produced over the past decade or so, this is easily the most attractive she’s produced, in production and design, and is worth picking up for that alone. As far as Barbour’s work, his poems have always had a quick sense of movement, riffing and bouncing from point to point, idea to idea, so the idea of “jazz poems” makes entirely too much sense. This is a fantastic little chapbook; I love the movement, the flow of the pieces, something Barbour has been exploring for quite some time, but somehow, never quite gets the credit or comprehension he deserves for it.

May 15 1953:

Perdido: memory gone. That’s how it works. You

salt the mind, still hoping for the real. They got

peanuts for the gig but you got the memory.

All the way back to 1953 and what

the hell happened that night. Those nights. There are some

things you only know by hearsay, yet it’s that story

you heard about ten years later & read about. Those few hours

are part of your memory now – as if you’d been there, listening.

Wee? No it was huge   cool or

hot it doesn’t matter, they tore the

house down for a small crowd soon to grow with telling.

A wonderful feeling, watching that white plastic wave & weave all

night long & the notes pour forth. Heaven-pointed trumpet, everyone

in synch: great music for the ages & you can still hear A Night in

Tunesia every time you place the disc just so.