12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Nilsen

Emily Nilsen was born and raised in Vancouver. Her book of poems, Otolith (icehouse, 2017) was published shortly after the chapbook Place, No Manual (Lake, 2017). She now lives in Nelson, BC.

1 - How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The timescale feels different. Most of the poems in Otolith were written in the last three years, but it took over a decade to get to them. I had to hike through some really dense thicket before arriving at a clearing where the book poems lived. I’m not sure how long it will take to bushwhack through to another set, but hopefully less.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I try to write fiction and it ends up being a poem. I have written non-fiction essays and love the feeling of stretching the words out. Big open skies.

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 varies. Some poems come out fast and fully formed. Others (and this is more the norm) are squeezed out of a rock. The fast ones are a joy. The slow ones pin me for weeks. Sometimes I’ll draw a poem first and then wait for it to turn.

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 usually set out thinking of something larger and then get blindsided by random questions that lead to smaller poems, which then either slide back into the big picture or they go out on their own. I have a folder called ‘orphans’ for the random ones. Maybe eventually they’ll form familial connections and I can call it a book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’ve only just started to enjoy readings. Before, they were mostly panic inducing: all those eyeballs looking up. But, it’s good to give the poems a human vessel and make words more than a series of symbols on a flat page.

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?
My first book and chapbook were released in 2017. Since then I’ve been circling around, trying to coax myself away from exploring the same questions. I’m giving in to the fact that, really, nothing has been resolved and that’s ok; there are (or should be) infinite answers to even a handful of questions, and vice versa. I’m mostly concerned with the insanity and absurdity of human beings, presences and absences thereof, disease, and the meaning of landscape - with or without us.

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?
Witness, interpreter, observer, imaginer, re-imaginer, mirror.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For me, essential. The editors I have worked with have climbed into the poems and looked at them from the inside out. I need someone to kick the dust around.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Last fall I went to a residency at the Art Shed in Sointula, BC. I went to write but when I got there the tank was empty, no fumes. Blank. I’d look out at the incredible-ness of humpbacks sighing and feeding just off-shore, hoping there’d be a flicker. There wasn’t. That emptiness is the worst. I’d met up with a friend there, who shared a quote by Maggie Nelson on accepting “the soggy, ill-defined but probably necessary periods between monsoon and drought.” I’m trying to get comfy with the feeling of nothing, when it moves in. That advice helped.

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?
It’s all over the place. Early mornings are the sweet spot when I’m at home. But mostly I need to hermit off somewhere for a long time to get going.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
A walk, water bodies, bookshelf.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Salt air. Wet pavement.

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?
All of the above. Parts of Otolith were written while at the Salmon Coast Field Station, a research house in the Broughton Archipelago. I loved the rigor, results, careful observation, discovery and language of science. Years earlier, I’d worked as a field assistant there and all the counting and measurement reorganized itself and morphed into a poem. Also, photography. I picked up Eugene Richards’ book The Blue Room in 2012 and it has stayed with me ever since.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to list, really. Any writing that points towards something, that holds my head in place and forces me to look.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
If I could, I’d write a novel or make a film. A long project that may or may not be synced with reality.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
Something more ergonomically satisfying and with more movement…

17 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Just finished Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese and wished I could have heard him read while alive. I recently watched Mommy by Xavier Dolan on a long flight back from Europe. Got me in the gut. It’s so weighted I lost track of being in the air.

18 - What are you currently working on?
Always poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

ongoing notes: late May, 2008

By the time I do another one of these, I’ll be back in that Ottawa, arriving May 31st; will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on June 21st? I’m doing a reading as part of a big chapbook launch in Edmonton before I leave, hosted by Trisia Eddy & her Red Nettle Press (come see me off! it will be your last Edmonton opportunity to see me…) on Thursday, May 29th, just a week before I do my first post-Edmonton Ottawa reading at Dusty Owl. Try to come to one, or even both!

Toronto ON: I saw Toronto writer, editor, publisher and creative writing teacher Stuart Ross while he was in Edmonton recently, touring around for his new poetry collection Dead Cars in Managua (DC Books, 2008) as well as a collaborative cd of his poems turned into songs, both of which he’ll be selling copies of when he arrives in Ottawa for the small press book fair. One of the most active pamphleteers in the country for poetry, here’s his small poem “FRENCH FRIES,” from the most recent handout:

You are lying in the back seat
of the blue 1964 Valiant station wagon.
You are so small you fit between the doors
stretched to your full length.
Your mother is in the front seat.
She thinks you are sleeping.
But your eyes are open and
you are are peering up, out
the side window, watching
the stars whip by. In cottage country,
there are so many stars.
You feel the car slow down
and come to a stop, and your father
whispers something to your mother.
You hear the door open and close.
In the front seat, your mother coughs.
Soon the car door opens again.
You smell French fries. It is time
to pretend to wake up.

Ottawa ON: Vancouver writer, publisher and filmmaker Warren D. Fulton has been staying the month of May in my little apartment, and producing some of the finest looking chapbooks of Pooka Press’ near 15 year existence.

What? I got belligerent, petulant—
A low yield month makes a poet mouthy.

Think a peeled pretendasourus, I mean
it was raw. What I wallowed in, I got
drunk on. On a halo made of weight,
see the nick where the Higgs boson goes?

I find these moments insetting. I found
a moment in settling. I couldn’t suspend it.

An orbit altering self-serious boor
unable to amass enough sauce for an
addendum. But I’ll nose the desired tuneup
from the subjective nihilistic mechanics (Marcus McCann)

some assembly required (2008) was produced in an edition of fifty copies for a reading he did at the Dusty Owl Reading Series on April 6, 2008, and includes work by and photographs of Steven Zytveld, Warren Fulton, Jennifer Mulligan, jwcurry, Max Middle, Sean Moreland, Marcus McCann, John W. MacDonald, Alnoor All Dina, Pearl Pirie, Amanda Earl and a couple of others. It’s good to see new work out of Jennifer Mulligan again, knowing that she really hasn’t written or published many poems over the past year, but for inclusion in such things as The Peter F. Yacht Club.

rembrandt paints greta garbo

“chemically, we’re already quite sympathetic.” – Greta Garbo

on canvas
one hundred selves
a writer
one thousand word portraits

silver screens
another hustle
in two dimensions

the world as x and y
geobeautiful co-ordinates
linear representation

definitive edges
could only be

stereo vision
cancer invaded mind (Jennifer Mulligan)

As well, after her chapbook The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008) was published, Amanda Earl realized she had written the alphabetical work without (somehow) the letter “h” (ironically, an image of an “h” is on the cover), so she’s been writing a series of “h” poems to make up for such, one of which even appears in this little collection.

I already know he’s planning to make a few more of these little publications while staying in my apartment, where he’ll be until the first week of June. To find out more about Pooka Press or this little publication, email Warren Fulton at pooka_press@yahoo.com

New England: From New England poet Fanny Howe, author of over twenty books of poetry and prose, comes the poetry collection The Lyrics (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007). For a while now, the idea of “lyric” or “lyrics” almost comes out as a tainted word, an antiquated idea in the realm of poetry (see Jon Paul Fiorentino’s forays into the “post-lyric,” for example).

Where, if I go far enough, will I find a sacred place? (“Forty Days”)

Part of this, certainly, comes from sheer overuse, as well as the fact that most poets who work within the realm have so little comprehension of it, and tend to simply re-cover the same old ground (this is true in so many poetic forms). Far too few actually know where the form has already been, how far you can go with it, and actually manage to push it beyond that boundary. For Fanny Howe, she is certainly one of those few who know how to work it, continually twisting and turning her lyric fragment into magnificent new stretches.

3.

What is shorter than a step?
An indrawn breath.
Not remembered when done
Not when not done either.

It’s the animal soul.
The Great Spirit who lolls
As time and broods.

During cemetery strolls
Breath comes and goes
Unnoticed. Melancholy is
Disavowed, no time for tone.

Plum buds have bloomed
On lilac Sunday in early May.
City property is sanctified
By pedestrian traffic.

What is heavier than lead?
Cries that can’t be heard.
Brother Granite. (“Forty Days”)

In a poetry fused with song, Howe works in her usual sequencial fragments, extending her line throughout the entirety of her writing, writing as far ahead as she does behind, as though creating, as bpNichol called it, the “poem as long as a life.” The Lyrics is made out of six sequences, including the final, six-part “Sheet Music,” which is absolutely lovely.

Kelowna BC: I recently got a copy of the first issue of LAKE: a journal of arts and environment, edited by Nancy Holmes and Sharon Thesen [see her 12 or 20 questions here], and a list of “advisory board” that includes a number of familiar names, including John Lent, Laurie Ricou and Don McKay, as well as Jen Budney, who used to work at Ottawa’s own Gallery 101 many moons ago (back when I ran a reading series there, since moved to OAG). A charmingly produced trade magazine, it includes poetry, interviews and articles, including a piece on Ken Belford (a self-professed “eco-poet”) by Barry McKinnon, essays by Donna Kane and McKay (another “eco-poet,” one could easily argue), and a piece “Writing Lake Superior” by Jenny Penberthy, written as an essay on a poem by Lorine Niedecker, “Lake Superior,” which is also included, and opens:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock

Produced through the Creative and Critical Studies Department at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, this is something that should be supported, so it can be allowed to continue.

Toronto ON: I recently got a copy of the new issue of EXISTERE: journal of arts and literature, produced through Vanier College, York University. Student journals always have the potential to be extremely interesting, but through the high turnover of student editors, don’t usually have any sort of uniformity that lasts more than a year or two (a few years ago, there was a spectacular run that included an interview with Toronto poet Stephen Cain), and this journal is a pretty good example of that, leaping and jumping into other territories. This issue, Vol. 27 No. 1, has some pretty interesting things in it, including an interview with Michael Redhill, fiction by Priscila Uppal and other fiction, artwork and poetry by a whole slew of folk, including David Groulx, Delia Byrnes, Christine Mika, John Unrau, Jim Johnstone, Binnie Brennan and Adrienne Gruber.

THREE HAIKUS: SELECTED
PLACES OF HONG KONG

Soho

on the long stairs
jubilant diners fall
night shower


Repulse Bay

splashing ocean
the snores
of deities


Temple Street

mahjong afar –
the hawkers’ chorus
turns dissonant (Arthur Leung)

One of the pieces that really struck was Michael Spring’s non-fiction piece “From Belfast to Glory,” writing his own personal history listening to the songs of Warren Zevon and Zevon’s last song, “My Ride’s Here,” co-written with Irish poet Paul Muldoon.

One thing disturbing in the Redhill interview was the reference to him meeting “Barry Nichols” while he was a student at York University. Excuse me? It might entirely be another human being in the world being referenced, but I think I can safely presume that Redhill was talking about “Barrie Nichol,” otherwise known as bpNichol, who taught at York University for years in the creative writing department until he died in 1988. Shouldn’t someone who is a student at York University at least have been aware of Nichol’s name at all? Yipes.